


Between The Lines: Friends

by AntiKryptonite



Series: Between The Lines [1]
Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: F/M, Season 1, a completely redundant AU that I had to write because I want to read it so bad, one change multiplies into a lot more, plus it gives me an excuse to keep rewatching the show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-07-05 18:44:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 50,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15869526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntiKryptonite/pseuds/AntiKryptonite
Summary: She comes into town expecting lobster menus, the smell of fish, and small town cops doing their best to pretend they’re not intimidated by stronger jurisdiction and a bigger badge than theirs. What she gets is something very different. "Are you a cop or something?" she asks. He lets out a sound she thinks is supposed to be a laugh but instead sounds like a bitter scoff. "No. Not a cop. Name's Nathan Wuornos. I'm a reporter for the Haven Herald."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I love Haven. It is my favorite show of all time and since the moment I discovered it (devouring the first three seasons on Netflix just as the fourth season was airing), I have wanted to write a fanfiction for it. Only, Haven is a remarkably cohesive, very intricate narrative that means changing one thing for a harmless little fic would make everything else that happens afterward come tumbling down. So for a long time, I was afraid to even try. But after watching it for the seventh or eighth time, I thought of something I could do. Make one change to one point in the timeline of Haven and follow the ramifications all the way through. It's actually a pretty redundant AU because I'm only writing it to savor the show I love, which means I follow the general guideline of the show, but I change things here and there and add things to try to make it interesting and fresh. It's definitely a Naudrey story, but I love Duke, too, so I try to keep him as integral to my story as he is to the show. Anyway, this is an insanely long author's note, but I hope some of you are still reading Haven fanfiction and enjoy this story ! :) There should be six parts to it (maybe seven if I can do a post-show part) and each part will follow a season.
> 
> Disclaimer: I take a lot of stuff from the show--I do try not to go word for word concerning the dialogue, but a lot of the background episode concepts are not mine at all. No copyright infringement is intended. I just love Haven too much not to play around with it.

She comes into town expecting lobster menus, the smell of fish, and small town cops doing their best to pretend they’re not intimidated by stronger jurisdiction and a bigger badge than theirs. What she gets is a chasm opening up in the road in front of her, a dizzying moment when the sky and the sea (very, _very_ far below her, but she does her best to shrug that off) merge into one, and an abrupt stop that feels more like a pause than an end. Death isn’t something she particularly fears, but she doesn’t exactly care for it either—only, badge and jurisdiction notwithstanding, she’s not quite sure how she’s going to get herself out of _this_ predicament.

The man (in a sweater that looks as if it’s decades old and with eyes bluer than the sea foaming beneath her) who knocks at her window and walks away at her sarcastic reply doesn’t look anything at all like an answer to her prayers, but his hands are strong and sure when he unexpectedly yanks her out of the car and he doesn’t shake with adrenaline or exclaim at their close call as they stand side by side to watch her car crash into sparks and debris against the cliff sides.

“Shame about the car,” is all he says, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. As if this sort of thing happens constantly and rescuing newcomers to town is a daily occurrence.

“Eh, it was a rental,” she replies, and can’t help but smile when he only nods thoughtfully. Silence seems to be something he’s comfortable with, far more so than she is, so she doesn’t wait for him to say anything more, just asks, “So, are earthquakes common in Maine?”

“Sandstone roads,” he explains, the explanation as sparse as his smiles (assuming he _can_ smile, which Audrey isn’t sure about just yet).

“Uh-huh.” She feels a laugh bubbling up inside her, but she can’t quite explain why so she nods instead and finds something else to say. “And any chance I might get a ride into town?”

He studies her, his expression closed off. Not guarded or wary, just blank. Reserved, as if he’s not sure what to make of her but is willing to wait until he knows more before he makes a final decision. “Could be,” he says.

Now she does laugh. “I see I’ll have to brush up on my monosyllabic while I’m here. Do you have a name?”

“Yep,” he drawls, and his expression hasn’t changed, but she would swear there’s the hint of a twinkle in his eye (she’s suddenly sure that he _can_ smile, and even laugh, if approached in the right way).

“And?” she prompts him, delighted with this reaction.

“Don’t know,” he says. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to give my name out to a strange woman carrying a gun.”

Her hand covers her gun instinctively, the weight of it solid and reassuring despite the layer of her coat between. With her hand on her weapon, she reassesses the man in front of her. A small town yokel for sure, with that sweater and the heavy boots and the hardy bag slung over his shoulder, not to mention the blue Bronco parked at a precarious angle off the road, but there’s something more there than seems apparent. He’s pulled her out of a teetering car, met her sarcasm with hidden humor of his own, and spotted her piece—all in under five minutes. That’s enough to capture her attention even without the sharp cheekbones, sea-blue eyes, and quiet reserve (though, she thinks, those certainly don’t hurt his case at all).

“Fed?” he asks, and she blinks at him.

“What, am I wearing a sign that gives it away?” she asks sardonically, and is startled to see the corner of his mouth twitch up.

“I sure hope so,” he says. “Speaking of, mind if I have a look at that badge?”

“Why?” she challenges him. But he only looks at her, not moving a single step toward his vehicle (in so much better condition than her own), so she sighs, rolls her eyes, and pulls out her badge to flash at him.

“Audrey Parker,” he reads before giving her a small smile. “Welcome to Haven, Parker.”

“Lovely place you have here,” she retorts. She starts moving to the Bronco then, hoping he’ll get the hint and follow her. He does, falling into step behind her as easily as if they’ve done it a dozen times before, though she notices that he keeps a few feet of distance between them (and he keeps his hands in his pockets, has since she told him her car was a rental, and she wonders what he’s hiding or if he’s afraid of something, afraid of _her_ ).

“It’s unique.” He steps around in front of her and opens the passenger side door, waiting for her to slide in. She’s a bit taken aback by the gesture (it’s as outdated as this tiny town hidden between the rugged ocean and the verdant forest), but it fits this man (his odd mingling of old-fashioned gestures and astute observations, backwards way of talking and timely appearance), so she murmurs a thank you and climbs up into the truck.

“So,” she says before he can shut the door between them. She meets his gaze, wonders why he seems reluctant to hold it, and asks, “What’s your name? Are you a cop or something?”

He lets out a sound she thinks is supposed to be a laugh but instead sounds like a bitter scoff. “No,” he says, gesturing to a belt devoid of badge or piece. “Not a cop. Name’s Nathan Wuornos. I’m a reporter for the _Haven Herald_.”

“Ah.” Audrey looks at the bag slung over his shoulder and realizes it’s a camera case; a pen and the top of a notebook peek out over the edge of a side pocket. “Is there a story out this way?”

“Just came from one.” He starts to shut the door and she moves to help him. The last thing she means to do is shut the door on his hand, but the door moves more easily than she expected and his hand is in just the wrong place.

“Oh!” she yelps, eyes flying to his face. He looks disconcerted and holds his hand slightly away from his body, but she’s seen people in pain before (has watched them bleed out on the ground, has seen them fall from bullets she’s aimed their way, has felt pain herself and fought to stay afloat above the rising swells of white-hot pain) and he’s not displaying any of the symptoms. “I’m so sorry!”

“It’s okay,” he tells her, as if she’s the one who’s been hurt and needs comforting. But he doesn’t meet her eyes, and the quirk of a smile at the corners of his mouth, the twinkle in his eyes, they’re all gone, replaced by quiet watchfulness, practiced blankness. “I didn’t feel it.”

“Oh. Tough guy, huh?” she asks, but he’s already walked away, rounding the Bronco to get to the driver’s side, and Audrey can only watch him in puzzlement.

He says nothing as he gets in and starts up the engine, or as he pulls back onto the road and leaves behind her car (not the right procedure for leaving the scene of an accident, she knows, but she doesn’t care about the car, doesn’t dare risk losing her ride into town, and doesn’t want to waste any time in finding Jonas Lester before he can hurt anyone else). It’s up to her to break the silence, a task she takes on with ease.

“What story did you just come from,” she asks, “and don’t you want to know where I want to go?”

“Assumed you’d want to head for the police station, seeing as how I’m fairly sure FBI agents don’t come to Haven just for our moose farm.” He doesn’t quite smile, not even the tiny hint he gave of one before, but the stiffness of his expression eases ever so slightly, which, Audrey is beginning to think, is almost as good as a smile from this taciturn and confusing man.

“Good thinking.” Her own smile is much more blatant than his. “I need to find a man named Jonas Lester.”

Nathan lets out a snort and pulls the Bronco to a stop.

“What?” Audrey looks all about, irritated, suddenly afraid he’s going to make her get out and walk from here. “What’s wrong? Not a friend of yours, I hope?”

“Definitely not,” he asserts. “But we might as well turn around. The story I just came from was that of Lester’s death. He fell off a cliff last night.”

Audrey catches his eye and grins at him. “Well then, sounds like I got here just in time. To the crime scene it is.”

* * *

The crime scene is much less surprising than her entrance into town. There’s a police chief who blusters with the best of them but, unsurprisingly, lets her do what she wants. There’s a horde of small town cops who watch her with narrowed eyes and suspicious aloofness. There’s a fair share of derision at her theories, rolled eyes when she insists they do their job correctly, and she even gets told where’s the best place in town to try lobster, which neatly delivers all of her original expectations, wrapped up and handed to her so easily and openly the only thing it’s missing is a big red bow.

All of her expectations fulfilled in one fell swoop, but not quite. Because what she didn’t expect is the fact that Nathan stays and waits for her a healthy distance from the crime scene, or the odd method of Lester’s death, or the way the chief impatiently leaves her to her work and makes his way to the distant Bronco to confer with Nathan, who stands beside his vehicle unmoving, seemingly silent. Audrey watches the confrontation out of the corner of her eye as she walks the crime scene looking for anything else that might have been missed along with the piece of paper in Lester’s pocket. The police chief is adamant, waving his hands and chewing his Nicotine gum almost violently, while Nathan appears unaffected, like the chiseled cliffs around her, standing straight and worn and alone despite the wind chafing their stone sides and the sea frothing along their foundations.

Audrey shakes the odd thought off, finishes her perusal of the crime scene, and blithely goes to interrupt whatever showdown is happening between Nathan and the local law enforcement. They clam up as soon as they see her coming—or, well, the chief does. Nathan just watches her come, silent and still (waiting for something to come, something he’s already sure will happen, only she can’t quite make out what that _something_ is).

“Well?” the chief demands of her, bottled frustration evident in every line of his stolid body. “Satisfied now?”

“Not unless there was a cannon up on that cliff to justify how far away from it our fugitive landed,” she retorts. “I expect to hear back from you when you know anything more about that extra piece of evidence.”

“Of course you do.” The chief draws himself up, icy eyes even colder beneath wild white brows set in a craggy, weathered face. “The best thing Lester ever did for this town was die, but you won’t let it be, will you? You—”

“Hey,” Nathan says, unexpectedly jumping in. Both Audrey and the chief turn to face him in surprise. “Might as well check it out, right?

“Oh, sure, sure!” The chief seems to swell, his indignation filling him up so that Audrey thinks he might explode right in front of her. “Why not? Not like we have anything better to do! Not like there’s not more important things for an FBI agent to do than wander around our town as if it’s tourist season! Go ahead, waste our time! Stick around if you want—we all know I can’t stop you!” And with that, he throws his hands up in the air and stomps off.

“Wow,” Audrey says into the silence he leaves behind. “Melodramatic much?”

“It did seem a bit much, even for him,” Nathan agrees, his expression contemplative as he looks in the direction the chief went.

“You know him well?”

Nathan looks back to her and that almost-smile is back. “In a manner of speaking. His name’s Garland Wuornos.”

Audrey’s eyes widen and she all but gapes up at him. Even squinting, she can’t see any similarities between the men. One is all stocky edges and errant frustration, all set to explode, random bits of energy and passion leaking out of him in gusts and spurts he can’t quite contain; the other is narrow lines and sharp points, quiet and guarded, and maybe there is passion and wildness to him, but it’s locked away, tamped down so tightly Audrey thinks that maybe it would take years she doesn’t have and stresses she can’t quite imagine to bring it boiling outward.

“He’s your father?” she asks, but saying it aloud doesn’t make it seem any more believable.

Nathan’s smile vanishes once more, and his eyes turn smaller, harder, as if he squints without even trying, drawing in on himself. “He is, though I doubt he’d appreciate the reminder. Come on, I’ll take you to the top of the cliff so we can look for that cannon of yours.”

“Nathan Wuornos,” Audrey says admiringly, “I like the way you think.”

She counts it as a personal victory when he actually chuckles in response.

* * *

The top of the cliff is a treasure trove. Nathan finds a hat, Audrey finds a gun, and both lead her to interesting places. The hat leads her to a man almost as quiet and restrained as Nathan, but _his_ stresses have already been endured and he ends up throwing her across the street with nothing more than (she thinks, though it seems impossible) his mind before disappearing in a fog that comes up out of nowhere. The gun, on the other hand, leads her to a dock in the middle of a hail storm, which lands her unconscious in the ocean only to wake up aboard a ship that looks to have seen better days.

Duke Crocker isn’t anything like she thought he’d be from Nathan’s scornful snort at the mention of his name and the biting things the reporter’d had to say about him. He’s definitely a smuggler, Audrey thinks, but a cultured one if the foreign newspaper he’s reading is any indication, and he makes a mean cup of coffee, doesn’t do bad laundry, and the fact that he saved her life on top of all that leaves her inclined to be lenient in her judgment of him. That he amuses her while still retaining his slight edge of danger is icing on the cake.

Still, Conrad is the one who can maybe possibly move things with his mind, the one who holds an attachment to Marion Caldwell, whose moods can theoretically call up mist or hail or lightning, and he’s the one with the motive for killing Lester. All of which means Duke is an interesting acquaintance, but he’s not a suspect.

“I saw the paper you pulled from Lester’s pocket,” Nathan tells her, leaning against the door of his Bronco, hands in his pockets. She’s known him for only a day, but he’s stood in this pose so many times already that she thinks she’ll be able to remember it clearly for years to come, no matter how many cases she solves or states she visits in between.

“Really,” she says flatly, striding up the pier to meet him. “And how did you manage that?” She can feel Duke’s eyes on her back, but he doesn’t follow her and Nathan seems determined to pretend he doesn’t exist. Audrey’s grateful Nathan had thought to give her his number, even more grateful he came to pick her up without asking too many questions, but she suddenly wishes for a taxi cab or a Bureau car instead. Clearly, there’s quite a bit of history behind the animosity between Nathan and Duke, and at the moment, she’s feeling too tired and too much in need of a shower to deal with it all.

Nathan shrugs and opens the passenger side door for her again. “My employers have contacts everywhere.”

“Your employers?” she asks, just because that seems the easiest question to answer. Small towns are weird. She’d known that already, but Haven is reinforcing that assumption in so many different ways.

“The owners of the _Herald_ ,” Nathan says impatiently. “Vince and Dave Teagues. Anyway, the paper matches the ripped chart on Duke’s boat. I saw it when you dragged me there yesterday—he had a chart that was missing its edge. I’ll bet you it’s a direct match.”

“I don’t know.” Audrey frowns. “You saw what Conrad did. Lester wasn’t killed by a gun—and besides, Duke said his gun was stolen and he filed a report on it. I’ll check to be sure, but I believe him. More, he’s got an alibi for the night Lester was killed. Conrad, on the other hand, lied about his.”

“Maybe Duke didn’t kill Lester,” Nathan says (a bit reluctantly, Audrey thinks), “but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t hired to get Lester out of country after Lester and whoever his accomplice is finished their con. Lester came looking for money, and he had to have some idea of where to get it.”

“I know where,” Audrey says, and she’s so satisfied by the feeling of missing pieces clicking into place that she doesn’t even notice how easy it is to discuss an ongoing investigation with a journalist who really has no business interfering in police matters.

* * *

Agent Howard says she needs to think more logically to excel with the FBI, but Audrey’s never solved cases by being logical. She relies on instinct, intuition, imagination, and more guesswork than any police force will ever be entirely comfortable with. It’s not textbook, not Quantico-approved, but it solves her cases and gets her out of sticky predicaments alive. It’s what lets her jump to the impossible conclusion that Marion Caldwell can control the weather and what helps her talk the distraught woman down.

Of course, it’s not quite as easy as figuring it out and then talking it out. Ted has a gun, and Audrey’s so intent on Marion’s grief and the fluctuating hurricane whipping all around her that she doesn’t realize Nathan has followed her out of the truck and decided to stop Ted on his own. She does hear the gunshot, but by the time she spins around, all she sees is Nathan running and tackling Ted to the ground. She feels a brief spurt of worry, feels tension thread through her body until she’s ready to run and jump at Ted herself, but then Nathan’s sitting up and he’s holding Ted’s hands behind his back, and the tension drains out of her, leaving her limp and relieved.

She tosses Nathan her pair of handcuffs and turns back to Marion, who dissolves into tears over a blue ribbon and falls into Audrey’s opened arms. Truthfully, despite the sympathy she offers, Audrey’s relieved and exhilarated at the way this case has turned out. For the first time, she isn’t left incandescent with rage and horror at finding a killer; instead, she’s suffused with sadness and empathy and, all right, yes, maybe the tiniest bit of hopelessness. After all, Marion has no idea what she’s been doing, and her loneliness, her need to find something _more_ , some purpose, is something Audrey can identify with. But a jail cell won’t fix or contain this problem, and short of killing Marion, Audrey doesn’t quite know what to do.

“Conrad will be beside himself,” Nathan says quietly as they stand over Ted and wait for the police to arrive. Marion sits in the backseat of the Bronco, silent and drained and quiescent. “He’s always loved Marion, I think. He’s good for her, too.”

Audrey is awake all at once, straightening and smiling up at him. “Nathan, you’re brilliant!” She means to explain her plan, to exalt in the idea of a happy ending all around for Conrad and Marion and the town of Haven, but that’s when she sees it.

Blood.

It’s all over his arm, dull and brick-red against the brown of his shirt, coating his sleeve to his skin so that she almost can’t see the wound near his shoulder where the bullet from that one explosive gunshot grazed him.

“Nathan!” she exclaims, her hands outraised to catch him when the shock inevitably wears off enough for him to tilt forward and collapse.

But he only looks at her, confused, a line in his brow and a question in his eyes. Just like before, there’s no sign of pain anywhere in his expression. He has both of his hands stuffed into pockets, as if his arm doesn’t bother him at all. As if the bullet wound is nothing more than an annoyance.

“What is it?” he asks.

“You’re…you’re bleeding,” she says, which is probably a stupid thing to say, but it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t usually _need_ to be said out loud, so she feels somewhat justified.

“Oh.” He looks down at his own arm, twisting his shoulder to make it easier for him to see. “It looks like just a graze,” he says after a moment. “Should be fine.”

“Fine?!” Audrey has her mouth hanging open, ready to repeat more of his vague words in the hope that hearing someone else say them will make him realize how ridiculous they sound, but she doesn’t get them out. She just stares at him, because this town is strange (stranger than most, maybe than _any_ ), and because if Marion can control the weather, then who’s to say other people can’t do other things. And because Nathan is watching her with that blank, _waiting_ expression, the one that makes it seem as if he’s just counting down the seconds until…until…well, she isn’t sure what yet. Until she does whatever it is he’s so sure she will do.

She closes her mouth, gives a short shake of her head, then squints up at him. The rain has faded, thankfully, vanishing in the lightning’s wake, but there’s still a heavy moisture to the air, tiny pinpricks of water that give the air substance and weight. “You really can’t feel it?” she asks.

Nathan tilts his head, as if to study her from a different angle. “No.”

“Can you feel…anything?” And even though she asks the question, she really doesn’t expect the answer he gives her.

“Nope.” He shrugs (his wounded shoulder rising and falling just a bit out of tandem with the other).

“Is that…was there an accident?”

“No,” he says yet again. She thinks he can sense her growing aggravation because he adds, “It’s called idiopathic neuropathy.”

She tucks the diagnosis away in her mind to look up later. “Can you feel pressure?” she demands, and raises her hand toward him as if to test it out then and there.

His tiny flinch away from her freezes her. “No.”

The moisture in the air turns heavier, colder, in her mouth as she breathes in, swallows, tries to find something to say to pretend to them both that neither noticed the flinch (because if he can’t feel anything, then why does he need to be afraid of touch?). “Can you feel fire?” she asks.

He lets out a tiny sigh. “No.”

“Can you feel ice?”

“Yes, oddly, I can feel ice,” he says, and Audrey’s breath whooshes out of her.

“You can feel _ice_?” she gasps.

There is a definite smile peeking out along the contours of his mouth. On anyone else, she wouldn’t notice it, but on him, it’s better than the chuckle she provoked earlier. “No,” he admits, “but I _can_ feel a headache coming on.”

Her next question (about headaches and sicknesses and whether he knows when he’s sick if he can feel headaches) goes unspoken thanks to the sound of sirens nearing and the sight of red and blue flashing through the ponderous air.

“Saved by the sirens,” Nathan mutters, but she’s sure he purposely said it loud enough for her to hear.

“That’s all right.” She grins and nudges his good side with her shoulder. “I know how to bide my time.”

She thinks he chuckles again but if so, the deafening sirens drown it out before the squad car and ambulance pull to a stop behind his Bronco and the sound shuts off. The red and blue still make rainbows in the damp air as the doors open and emergency response personnel spill out into the riven meadow where Marion confronted Ted. Nathan shrinks in on himself, huddled up against his truck (“Had it since I was nineteen,” he told her when driving her away from Duke’s, and she teased him for that until he retorted that at least he didn’t drive his vehicles off of cliffs), and Audrey can’t help but frown when she realizes that he has a way of making himself almost invisible around others.

In fact, the uniforms who come to meet her by Ted don’t even glance Nathan’s way, just take Ted from her, nod at her concise (very, _very_ edited) report, and start containing the scene, taking away Ted’s gun in an evidence bag.

“Marion’s fine,” Audrey says, irritated when the EMTs keep trying to get past her to the Bronco, where Marion’s sitting with her head in her hands, clearly not interested in emerging from her temporary refuge to ride back into town in the ambulance. “She was just…she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Nathan’s hurt. He’s been shot.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Nathan give her a sharp glare, though surely he didn’t really think all that blood on his arm could be ignored. It’s a gunshot wound, a shot fired at a civilian by a man evading arrest by a federal officer. More than that, it’s a _gunshot wound_ and he’s bleeding all over the place. Even without him being able to feel it, Audrey is a bit surprised he hasn’t keeled over from shock and blood loss yet.

The EMTs stare at her blankly for a long moment during which Audrey glares at them. They know their job—Nathan’s three steps away from her, from them, and even in the twilight air, it’s not that hard to see the blood, smeared against his neck now from all the times he’s shrugged.

“It’s all right, Parker,” Nathan says, almost hastily. “I’m fine.”

“Right.” The EMTs nod and turn back to the ambulance.

Audrey feels a sudden sharp surge of anger, so strong it can’t be diluted even by her confusion. Blowing out a huff, she stalks around and cuts the EMTs off. “What are you doing? He’s been shot! He needs medical care!”

“Parker!” Nathan’s voice, sharp and urgent, only makes her angrier, and she plants her hands on her hips while she glares at the EMTs.

“I don’t know what’s going on or why you’re ignoring an injury, but I do know that there’s a GSW behind you and whether he can feel it or not, it’s something that needs to be documented—proof that will be necessary in a court of law. So whatever it is you’re avoiding or point you’re trying to prove, you get over it and you help that man, you understand me?”

Sullen glances, mutters hidden under their breath and beneath the wet air, but Audrey doesn’t care because they turn (reluctantly, but still) and make their way to a hunched and motionless Nathan. He doesn’t meet Audrey’s eyes, doesn’t attempt to explain what happened, just stands there, leaning against his truck, and stares straight ahead. There’s a curious blankness covering his features like a mask (and it’s not the absence of pain, she thinks, but more like numbness cloaking pain too great to give into), and for a moment, she wonders if she did the right thing. Only a moment, though. Maybe she’ll never be as logical or deductive as the Bureau wants her to be, but if there’s one thing she does know, it’s that the proper evidence documented at the right time solves a lot more cases than daring heroics or waving guns.

Still, it’s a very long period of time that Nathan’s surrounded by the EMTs. She watches him out of the corner of her eye, even while supervising the crime scene being set up, and notices immediately when he’s ushered to the back of the ambulance. But whether it’s due to the EMTs’ curious lack of care for Nathan or Nathan’s own powers of persuasion (which would be interesting to see from this man of few words), it’s apparently decided that he doesn’t need to ride to the hospital. The minute he climbs out of the ambulance (moving slowly, jerkily, a bandage on his shoulder, a sling on his arm, his sleeve pushed aside and his jacket clutched in his good hand), Audrey heads over to him.

“How is it?” she asks without preamble. “Any loss of mobility?”

He doesn’t meet her eyes. “Just a graze,” he says shortly, and brushes past her, headed to the Bronco.

“So it’s going to be okay?” she presses, keeping step with him.

“Of course.” He scoffs and finally grants her a look, albeit a short, hurried one. “I told you, nothing to worry about.”

“Oh, really.” Audrey comes to a halt at the same time as he does, only she makes sure she’s a step too near him, preventing him from opening the driver side door and clambering in, cutting their conversation short. “So do the EMTs always refuse to acknowledge you, or is this just a special occasion?”

His shoulders round a bit, counteracting some bit of his height and leaving him stooped and small. He looks almost frail, and Audrey frowns because it’s not a look that suits him. He’s silent for a long moment; it’s hard, but Audrey outwaits him. Finally, he lets out his air in a small sigh and leans back against the truck (his good hand is in his pocket again, she notes, and wonders why the sight already seems as familiar to her as Howard’s stern features). “Not just the EMTs,” he admits.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she presses, and if it sounds more like a demand than a question, she can’t help it. Small towns are weird, granted, but to the point of ignoring a man just because he can’t feel? How does that even make sense?

Nathan turns his head and studies her, curiously, as if she’s an oddity he can’t quite figure out (and she’s come to know that feeling pretty intimately in the last two days). “A man who can’t feel anything,” he says quietly. Neutrally. As if it doesn’t affect him, doesn’t hurt him. Doesn’t touch him. “That doesn’t seem like a curse to you?”

“It seems like a burden,” she says, nodding, “one that shouldn’t have to be carried alone.” She sounds like Sam talking to Frodo, she realizes, and almost chuckles over it. But Agent Howard never seemed too amused by her obscure references and odd sense of humor, so she shrugs it off and goes back to peering at Nathan through the almost-fog and blank mask between them.

“Well,” Nathan looks almost taken aback. “That’s not how most see it.”

She opens her mouth to say more, to ask more questions (to wonder incredulously how a medical staff—or is it really the whole town?—can be so blind as to think that if something doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t matter), but Nathan is already sliding agilely between her and his door, opening it, lifting a foot to climb in.

“Ready to go?” he asks. “Big case to wrap up.”

Audrey pauses, but grudgingly gives in. “Yeah,” she says. “Though who knows how I’m going to explain any of it in my report. Agent Howard’s never going to take me seriously again if I try to tell the truth.”

“A woman controlling the weather doesn’t happen often in your important FBI cases?” Nathan asks, and Audrey has to do a double-take to see the glint of humor in his eyes as he waits for her to get in the truck.

Audrey glances in the back to see how Marion takes Nathan’s comment, but the woman is asleep, her head leaning against the window, her eyes closed, mouth slack. Her hands are curled up into loose fists in her lap, innocent and harmless-looking, as if there isn’t still electricity crackling in the air and rain hanging like fog between trees because of her anger and betrayed hurt.

“No,” she answers Nathan. “I never get interesting cases like that. Maybe Haven has something to offer after all.”

“Maybe so,” Nathan says, almost contemplatively. Then he turns and quirks a brow at her. “You coming or what?”

“Yeah, yeah.” She laughs and hurries around the truck (and it shouldn’t feel odd after just two days to open her own car door, but it kind of does).

“Do you want to stop for pancakes on our way?”

Audrey glances askance at Nathan, glad to put the crime scene (such as it is) behind them and move on. “Pancakes? What about lobster? I’ve heard there’s a place in town that serves the best lobster in Maine.”

“Maybe,” he says noncommittally. “But I don’t like lobster. I really like pancakes.”

Her laugh comes unexpectedly, and she can see her reflection grinning at her from the window, marred by trees lining the road. “All right,” she agrees. “Pancakes it is.”

Nathan’s smile is small and unpracticed, but just enough to make her look forward to having breakfast for dinner.

* * *

Paperwork is as annoying in Haven as it is in Boston and Chief Wuornos seems to delight in hovering behind her, casting a cloud of gloom and doom as easily discernible as any of Marion’s, as if he’s upset with her for solving his case for him. Lester’s dead, Conrad’s agreed to keep Marion calm, Ted’s in prison with a heaping pile of evidence and witness statements to keep him there for a while, and altogether, it seems like a happy ending.

If, that is, she can ignore the fact that in most towns—small or large—controlling the weather isn’t something that’s possible. And where there’s one exception, there could be more.

But still. Lester’s dead, and there’s no more reason for her to be here. Agent Howard will be wanting her back in Boston with her (very routine, very dull, very fictional) report in hand. It’s a long drive back in her new rental (silver instead of red this time, so maybe it’ll bring her better luck), and if she wants to get there before nightfall, she should be leaving soon, but she makes time for one last stop. Well, one stop and a short but mesmerizing conversation with Duke, who’s conveniently walking past the police station when she emerges. He flashes her his (trademark, she’s sure) grin, hands her a coffee cup (“It’d still be pretty cool if I could guess how you like your coffee,” he says, but he hasn’t), and asks if he’s sure he can’t convince her to stay in town long enough to try dinner. “With you?” she asks, and maybe she’s flirting a bit, but tall, dark, and mysterious has always been her thing, and she’s leaving town anyway so a bit of harmless flirtation can’t get her into too much trouble.

“Of course with me!” Duke exclaims, scandalized and offended and laughing at her through dark, glittering eyes. “Only the best for the only cop I like! You should feel honored, actually.”

“I’ll try,” she retorts. “Thanks for the coffee—and for the help. Have you ever helped solve a crime before?”

“Uh, that would be a no.” He shrugs, much too innocent-looking for his own good. Any federal officer worth her salt knows that someone who looks _that_ innocent is trying too hard. “I have helped cover a couple up, though.”

Audrey tries to resist but laughs anyway. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. Maybe Nathan was right about you after all.”

“Nathan Wuornos? Right?” Duke’s grin doesn’t waver at all, but there is something serious, something almost grim, in his expression, as if _now_ , after all their repartee, he is trying too hard. “That would be a miracle in and of itself. I’m sure, being the astute investigator that you are, you’ve noticed he doesn’t exactly have a lot of fans.”

“Yeah.” She straightens, clutches her Styrofoam cup a bit tighter in her hand. Her other hand is tucked into her back pocket, her wrist brushing her gun. “Why is that?”

Duke examines her a long moment, and for the first time since she’s woken up in his bed and found him reading a paper in the shadow of her drying clothes, he is completely serious. “I don’t ask questions, and maybe you shouldn’t either. Suffice it to say that Pinocchio isn’t exactly a real boy and that has led to quite a few key figures around here being disappointed with him.”

“Really,” she says flatly. Audrey doesn’t like this, not one little bit, and if this wasn’t a small town, if she didn’t already have her rental and her goodbye present sitting in the front seat, she might even consider staying a bit longer and trying to get to the bottom of this. “That’s it? _That’s_ the story? He has a medical condition so he’s suddenly a social leper?”

“Huh.” Duke peers at her, prowls around her a bit to study her from a different angle, oblivious to her narrowed eyes. “You didn’t look up that supposed medical condition, did you?”

“No,” she replies guardedly. “Why?”

“Might be interesting reading.” Duke shakes himself. She can see the serious mien falling at his feet like shattered pottery, leaving behind the mask beneath, all grins and innuendo and smooth charm. “But why read when you could be having dinner? With me?”

“Sorry,” she says, but the flirtation is gone. “I’ve got to be heading out.”

“Well, Agent Audrey Parker, it was a pleasure while you were here.” He tips an imaginary hat to her, points to her coffee as if to remind her that she holds it in her hand (and it’s too sweet, but the gesture was a good one, plus it’s free, so she definitely plans on drinking it), and then he saunters away, whistling a merry tune to himself, his tattered, salt-stained clothing seemingly stolen from some other era yet a perfect blend with the town surrounding him.

Audrey looks after him before shrugging off the uneasiness his remarks left and sliding into her car. She still has another stop to make before she can put Haven in her rearview mirror.

* * *

The _Haven Herald_ is based in a small yellow building down a nondescript street that’s pretty much identical to every other street in Haven. If it weren’t for the blue Bronco parked halfway down the street from the corner building with the words ‘Haven Herald’ painted on it, she might have missed the place altogether.

Audrey scoops up the goodbye gift she picked up at the gift shop across from the police station, heads up the wooden ramp, pulls open the door with its swaying blinds, and enters a cozy room. Not exactly what she expected. The walls are plastered with newspaper articles, black and white pictures, post-it notes, and bulletins; two desks placed back to back beyond a waist-high gate to her left are overflowing with papers that only begrudgingly make room for small laptops; and just in front of the door, behind a clean counter that seems something like an oasis amidst the rest of the clutter, there’s another smaller desk. It’s neat and organized, the laptop front and center, the cup of pens and wooden box holding memos and mail set in such a way as to balance out the effect. Audrey isn’t surprised at all to see Nathan sitting at this desk, his camera bag at his feet, a steaming mug of coffee in his hand.

He looks innocent and unworried, not at all like a man ostracized by an entire town. But then, he hadn’t looked like a man who was shot either.

“I brought you some flowers,” she says out loud.

Nathan doesn’t look away from his computer screen. “I know,” he says with a conspicuous sniff. “Lilies and lilacs.”

“Very impressive.” Audrey sets the vase on the counter with a thump, and feels gratified when he finally looks up at her. His right arm is still in a sling, but he looks well. He looks safe, and something in Audrey’s chest eases a bit. She doesn’t work with a partner for a reason, and she hates that he was hurt at all for helping her, but it’s comforting to know that he’ll be okay (she pointedly ignores the little voice asking how okay he can be when he’s ignored by everyone in town). “That does not, however, negate the fact that you are a very odd man.”

Nathan’s smile isn’t humorous at all this time, and Audrey wishes she’d said something else. _Anything_ else. But he stands and walks up to the counter, leans against it to examine her flowers. “So. Leaving, are you?”

It’s impossible to say, from his tone, whether he wants her to go or hopes she will stay.

“Always another case,” she says with a shrug. She’s a bit puzzled as to why she can’t think of much to say. This is the easy part, after all, the part where she thanks the locals for their help (sincerely this time, but usually sarcastically and with an inward roll of her eyes) and heads out of town, on to bigger and better things. But for some reason, she feels almost…reluctant…to leave. Very strange. Of course, she probably won’t be able to find anything nearly as exciting anywhere else as what Haven has offered her in her few days here.

“Well…” Nathan pauses, and for the first time, rather than keeping his silence, he seems to be at a loss for words. Audrey would have teased him about it, but she can’t seem to find any words herself.

Fortunately for them both (and her dignity), they’re interrupted by the door opening behind her. Audrey steps back a bit to give the two men room to enter. One’s tall and broad with an overabundance of hair, the other short and slight and balding. There couldn’t be two men more dissimilar, but they move in sync, each knowing where the other is without ever having to look up.

“Nathan, how’s the arm?” the shorter one starts to ask, but the question is gone before it’s finished as he catches sight of Audrey standing between the counter and the door. The bigger man looks back, puzzled, and then he too comes crashing to a halt, his eyes fixed on Audrey with a strange sort of intensity.

“Hi,” Audrey offers, a bit amused by their reactions.

“Ah,” Nathan says, straightening and retracting back into himself. “This is Dave and Vince Teagues, the owners of the _Haven Herald._ Guys, this is Audrey Parker, the FBI agent who solved the Lester case.”

“Ch-charmed,” Dave, the shorter one, manages. He offers her a smile that’s as tentative as it is strained. “Always lovely to get new visitors to our town. Not enough visitors lately, isn’t that right, Vince?”

“Right,” Vince says hastily. He doesn’t even attempt a smile, just continues to stare. “I suppose the strange weather doesn’t help matters.”

“Weather’s weather,” Dave says, almost testily. “Nothing strange about that.”

Finally, Vince looks away from her, a snort destroying his odd intensity as he glares at his brother (she assumes they’re related, anyway; nobody but family can perfect glares like that). “Right. Because hailstorms in the middle of a sunny day are very common.”

Dave nods as if Vince has proved his point. “Exactly,” he says with satisfaction, and then _he_ turns to stare at her. Vince’s stare was unblinking, unwavering, but Dave’s is jumpy, his eyes darting to her, then away, then back again, as if it’s dangerous to look at her too long.

“Nice to meet you too,” Audrey says, and decides to ignore the stares. They’re strange old men for sure, but Nathan is watching the scene unconcernedly, as if this is somewhat normal behavior for his employers, so Audrey sees no reason not to do the same. “Your reporter was a lot of help. I’m glad you could spare him.”

“Oh, yes,” Vince says without bothering to cast even a glance Nathan’s way. “That’s Nathan for you. Always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Audrey frowns. Nathan, she notices, doesn’t react at all except, perhaps, to turn his attention to the vase of flowers sitting on his counter. “I’d say more like the _right_ place at the _right_ time,” she says. “I’m sorry he got hurt helping me, though.”

The two brothers nod, a bit vacantly. She doubts they heard her at all.

Rolling her eyes, Audrey straightens, frustrated and upset for no reason she can put into words. “Something wrong?” she asks bluntly.

“Oh!” Both the old men startle and shift their weight, moving from foot to foot until it looks as if they’re moving all about the office even though neither one of them actually moves.

“So sorry,” Vince says hurriedly. “It’s just…I can’t help but think I’ve seen you somewhere. Ever been to Haven before?”

“That didn’t sound creepy at all,” Dave whispers loudly.

“No, can’t say that I have. Such a shame, too,” Audrey adds teasingly, smiling at Nathan, “considering that the pancakes are some of the best I’ve ever tasted.”

“Huh,” Dave says. “Interesting. Interesting. You do look familiar. Of course, we meet quite a few people in our line of work. But…hmm.”

“Hmm,” Vince echoes. “Maybe…” And without missing a beat, Dave swivels to meet his brother’s gaze and they both share a look, something passing between them that Audrey can’t possibly interpret. Then, in a flurry of motion, the two brothers head to their respective desks, sit down, and begin typing away at their computers in tandem, Dave muttering a bit under his breath, Vince utterly silent.

Audrey raises her brows and steps closer to Nathan. “Ooookay. Bit interesting.”

“Never a dull day,” Nathan says with a shrug. “But don’t let first impressions fool you—they know this town better than anyone, and they’re not quite the harmless old men they appear.”

“Personal experience teach you that?” she asks, and is gratified when Nathan cracks the edges of another smile.

“Maybe.”

The conversation seems doomed to fizzle out again, but Audrey jerks her chin toward the sling on Nathan’s arm and asks, “How’s the shoulder doing?”

“Doesn’t hurt,” he replies dismissively, as if that’s all that matters.

“Right.” She rolls her eyes. “Tough guy.”

It seems a simple statement, not at all up to her usual standard (and yes, she really does have one), but it actually makes Nathan smile. A real smile, open and whole and not at all like the tantalizing hints of smiles she’s seen up till now. He looks…normal…when he smiles, as if he’s just another guy on the street, some random person who helps her on a case. He looks as if he’s never heard of idiopathic neuropathy or EMTs who ignore wounded citizens or small town idiosyncrasies. He looks happy, and he doesn’t stop smiling until her attention is jerked from him to the Teagues brothers jostling up beside her. The instant she looks away, she thinks she sees Nathan’s smile disappear, and sure enough, when she sneaks a glance of him, he looks as unruffled and stoic as if his mouth muscles have never done a bit of work in his life.

“Knew you looked familiar!” Dave pronounces triumphantly.

“I think _I’m_ the one who mentioned it,” Vince says, more than a hint of exasperation creeping through.

Dave huffs. “Does it matter?”

“It does when you—” Vince begins, but Dave doesn’t let him finish.

“Here you are. It’s an old picture, of course—the article’s old—but it was a big story in its time. Something happens like that and it stands out even twenty-seven years later.”

“Don’t just stand there yapping at her—let her see the article!” Vince orders, and Dave obligingly holds out a paper still warm from the printer.

Puzzled and curious, Audrey reaches out and accepts the newspaper article. She looks down, expecting she doesn’t even know what (something more in line with lobster menus, the smell of fish, and uninteresting cops than with the Haven she’s ended up finding), but her smile vanishes almost before it even begins.

She’s looking at herself.

Herself with long, dark hair.

Herself in a grainy, black and white photo with a 1983 date stamped on it.

Herself in Haven, holding a child’s hand, standing over a body under the shadow of the words ‘Who Killed The Colorado Kid?’.

Herself, but it’s not her—she’s never been here, was scarcely born in 1983, and she’s never had dark hair in her life, and the whole thing’s impossible. As impossible as flying monkeys or vampires in real life or…or women who control the weather with their emotions.

It’s impossible, but she’s looking at a woman who could be her twin.

Or her mother.

Nathan is watching her, a crease in his brow, right between his eyes. She hesitates, then hands the picture over to him. She should be looking at the Teagues brothers, should be asking them how and why and where and _who_ , but all she can do is watch Nathan study the picture speculatively. He stares at it a moment, looks up at her, back to the picture, and then, still with no change of expression, hands the paper back over. “She looks like you,” is all he says.

Something inside of her eases. She has no idea what it is, or why Nathan’s calm reaction stills her panic before it can even start, but she turns abruptly to face his employers.

“I don’t understand,” she says. Another completely obvious statement, but it needs to be said because there’s nothing else _to_ say.

“Do you have family here? Think she could be your mother?” Vince asks curiously. And yet he’s staring, staring, _staring_ , and beside him, Dave is looking, looking away, looking back, worrying the rim of his floppy hat between his gnarled hands.

“I—” Audrey frowns and glares down at the picture again, wishing she could bring forth the answers. Her eyes dart over the article, skim through the words caught by the printer, but there’s nothing there except the details of a man who was never identified found dead on the beach twenty-seven years ago. Nothing there except her own face. “She could be,” she finally admits. “I was raised in an orphanage—never knew my parents.”

“Well then…” Vince trails off as if that’s all that’s needed to be said, but he doesn’t sound decisive at all. He sounds as if he’s waiting for something (everyone in this entire town is waiting for something, she thinks irrationally).

Audrey nods and chews the inside of her lip. Ten more minutes and she would have been out of this town. Ten more minutes and she would have had an interesting mystery to mull over in the night when she was alone. But now…now Nathan is watching her with one arm in a sling and one hand in his pocket, and the Teagues are nervously shifting their weight in front of her, and Duke’s ominous words are ringing in her ears, and she doesn’t think she’s going to be leaving nearly as soon as she’d thought.

So she makes her excuses, and she escapes their waiting looks, and she drives and drives and drives until she finds the spot of beach immortalized on the front page of the _Haven Herald_. And then she stands there in the dusk holding an impossible picture, feeling a long-buried hope rise up inside her, and realizes that maybe, just maybe, this is the place, the mystery, she’s been looking for.

Her phone beeps when she makes the call. The wind, smelling of salt and brine (and maybe she imagines it, but she thinks she catches a whiff of pancakes), whispers through her hair, along her cheeks. The waves murmur in front of her, not enough to drown out the sound of her internally coming to a decision.

“Agent Howard,” she says when he answers. “You know that vacation time I never use? I think I’m going to need it.”


	2. Chapter 2

For the first few days, Audrey’s pretty sure she made a mistake. If anybody knows anything about the woman in the newspaper clipping (and she’s sure they do, sure they know _something_ at least, because she gets too many second glances and perplexed stares and awkward greetings), they’re not telling. The police chief promises her help, but only on a quid pro quo basis and so far she’s done all the quid without receiving any of the quo. At least the police work, though entertaining and frustrating by turns, keeps her from getting too bored, but she’s also sure it’s nothing more than a distraction. Garland Wuornos is either obtuse and infuriating as a natural, God-given talent, or he’s purposely working at it, doing everything in his power to keep her from discovering whatever he knows about the Colorado Kid case.

“It was a long time ago,” is all he says, repeated over and over again, each time a different intonation, as if simple repetition is the key, as if finding the right tones will make her suddenly stop pestering him for the truth about the woman in the picture.

As far as she can tell, Haven has only three redeeming attributes: Rosemary’s, Duke Crocker, and Nathan Wuornos.

Rosemary’s has the best coffee, the freshest-tasting pastries (so much better than Larissa’s), and the nicest service (which, translated, means she doesn’t ask too many questions about the newcomer to Haven and doesn’t _always_ rub it in Audrey’s face that she hasn’t lived there for generations).

Duke laughs at her (“Officer-Agent Parker,” he says, as if it’s a real title he didn’t just make up on the spot), which is an interesting enough rarity in this town that takes itself so seriously, and he slips her interesting tidbits of information that keep her from being completely ignorant of the town’s goings-on. He makes her feel like not _everyone_ in this town is completely removed from the world outside.

Nathan, on the other hand, only goes to show just exactly _how_ different this town and its citizens are. But he’s also the one she sees the most, more even than Rosemary.

She volunteered Nathan into showing her the town that first day of her official non-FBI stay. “Don’t leave me hanging,” she said after telling him she’d decided not to move on just yet. “What if I drive off another cliff?”

“All right,” he’d agreed with a shrug. “But I’m driving.”

“My own personal chauffeur,” she’d laughed, and then told him when and where to pick her up in the morning (but not too early because early mornings are the bane of her existence and would be outlawed if she had anything to say about it). He came, right on the dot (which didn’t surprise her, but it did leave her scrambling to finish buttoning her jacket, all wrinkled from its stay in the overnight bag she’d salvaged from the wreckage of her doomed rental), knocking at her door and looking at her as if completely surprised to see her when she pulled it open, one hand holding her hair up in a ponytail while the other fumbled with the elastic band.

“You’re here,” he said, as if it were a question.

“Yeah, and you’re early.” She finished tying her hair back and patted her pockets looking for the key to the motel room. “What?” When she’d cast him a sidelong glance, she wasn’t surprised to see him sliding his hands into his pockets and slumping his shoulders, his brief stint of emotion wiped away from his face like an embarrassing stain. “Were you hoping I’d forget?”

“No. Just…surprised you’re here.”

She narrowed her eyes, but he’s extremely skilled at the whole close-mouthed thing, so she shrugged it off and followed him to his Bronco. Moments later, after he’d bought her a coffee to drink on their tour of the town, when they were quiet and side by side in the front seat, he’d said, very quietly, “People don’t usually show up. When they make appointments with me.”

“Makes it kind of hard to get an interview, doesn’t it?” she’d asked, not quite sure what he meant (knowing what he meant but pretending she didn’t because it just made anger start a slow, boiling burn inside her).

His lips had quirked again. “Never underestimate the effectiveness of an ambush,” he said, and then, astonishingly, he’d winked at her (as if an entire town ignoring him and avoiding him was nothing more than a minor inconvenience). “Which is why it pays to follow people around in cars. You know, in case they decide to drive off cliffs.”

She still can’t decide what infuriates her more—that the townspeople treat Nathan like that, or that Nathan accepts it as normal.

Of course, she’d be lying if she said she doesn’t secretly like the fact that he has so much time to spend with her. Her new rental isn’t worth the money she pays out for it (but there’s nothing better in town, and she doesn’t care anyway because Nathan took her ‘personal chauffeur’ comment to heart), and whenever she ventures out on cold Maine mornings and hears her car make a protest at the first turn of the key, she pulls out her phone and presses her speed-dial (somewhere in the couple weeks since arriving in Haven, he’s migrated to number one on her phone, but she can’t quite remember when that happened; it’s a good thing, though, as evidenced by how quickly he came to her call when Bobby’s dreams left her wrapped in a suffocating cocoon), and moments later, he’ll drive up, ready to take her wherever she needs to go.

He’s the one who helps her when she finds a young kid whose dreams become reality (and he’s the one who almost drives his vehicle off a cliff then, something she teases him about constantly for days afterward), and he’s the one who finds the man whose music can turn the sane insane and vice versa. Audrey likes having Nathan drive her around, likes that he’s always a step behind her (it feels a bit like having a partner, even if he doesn’t wear a badge and never sticks around to help her file the paperwork, and it’s become a lot harder to pin down the reasons she never liked working with anyone before), but she does question her willingness to put him in danger when he’s the one who goes crazy for a while. She finds him inside the bowling alley with a lighter under his arm and blisters spreading like cancer along his skin.

Duke never does tell her exactly what happened on the boat between them, but when Audrey returns to find Nathan attacking the smuggler, she almost can’t pull the trigger of her Taser. Hates that she has to, and even when she does, even when he turns and looks at her with a look that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he really _can’t_ feel anything, she still feels awful for shooting him in the back. She feels almost like she betrayed him, like she was the one person he could count on and by letting him stroll into danger, letting him risk his mind when his body has already turned on him, she’s let him down.

Not that he ever says anything about it.

“I’m not sure which is worse,” is all he says when it’s over, when his eyes have gone back to normal and his hands clench the railing of Duke’s boat in a futile effort to feel something, to ground himself (and the blisters on his arm are hidden by the sleeve of his shirt). “Going crazy, or being sane afterwards.”

Audrey watches him. She has lots she could say (being at a loss for words isn’t something Audrey Parker normally has to worry about), but in the end, she settles for shrugging (she’s picked up some habits from him). “I don’t know,” she says, “but I’m glad you’re back.”

He doesn’t smile—he’s still Nathan Wuornos, after all—but his eyes lose a fraction of their intensity and his grip on the railing eases ever so slightly, and that’s almost as good.

So yeah, maybe he’s different (as different as the town itself, all closed up and rigid and afraid, but hiding so many good things if only there was a chance to draw them out), but he’s still a redeeming point in Audrey’s eyes.

* * *

Being in Haven teaches her quite a few lessons. First and foremost, it teaches her patience (a trait she’s never cared for, frankly). Working with Garland Wuornos and his hovering tactics are enough to do that all on their own, to say nothing of the coroner, Eleanor Carr (dropping inflammatory hints all over the place and then clamming up as if she hadn’t just referred back to the woman in the newspaper clipping Audrey carries around with her everywhere), or the townspeople themselves, who steadfastly refuse to admit that there are strange things happening in their strange little town almost every day.

“Every town has a few skeletons in its closet,” Nathan tells her when she comes back from seeing the Reverend Driscoll, when she’s shaking inside with her skin all clammy and itchy from holding back all the things she’d wanted to spit at the man who greeted her in such a friendly, obsequious fashion and then turned around and warned her to stay away from Nathan (“God’s turned his back on that man, and we can only do the same or risk His divine retribution on us as well as on the other unfortunates of this town,” he’d spouted, as if by simply saying it, he made it so).

“Well, this is a big freaking closet,” Audrey retorts, and slams the Bronco door behind her to give emphasis to her words. Not that she’s mad at Nathan, but he’s the one with her and he always takes her rants calmly, listening and nodding and then letting her quiet all on her own. _Helping_ her quiet because he just takes it all, everything this town and life and she can throw at him, takes it and then calmly does his job without complaint and still manages to summon a twinkle in his eye and the quirk of a smile and a freely offered ride.

“The Rev didn’t make a good impression, I take it,” he observes when he catches up with her and shuts the driver’s side door, a bit more gently than she’d managed with her own door. Nathan has monosyllabic down to an art form, so Audrey immediately notices there’s a slight catch to his tone (like a blaring siren) as he asks the question.

“Let’s just say he’s not my favorite person,” she admits.

She might have imagined it, but she swears she sees the hint of relief in Nathan’s eyes. He avoids her gaze almost immediately, looking away and pretending her answer didn’t move him at all. Then he ruins it by saying, “Good.”

“No love lost between you two?” Audrey watches him closely (another advantage to letting him drive is that it gives her the opportunity to study him openly, try to discern more of what goes on behind his stoic mask).

Nathan shrugs. “I took his daughter to prom against his wishes.”

“Aha!” Audrey laughs, an unexpected laugh that surprises even her. “So maybe he’s got reason for feeling slightly ambivalent toward you!”

Nathan stares straight ahead. “Nothing happened. She came because she felt sorry for me; Hannah’s always been kind. But she went home and I watched a meteor shower alone, and that was that.”

Audrey digests that in silence for a moment (Nathan makes her learn patience just as much as Haven does, really, makes her _want_ to learn patience, but it takes her a while before she realizes that, it’s such a subtle, slow transition). “So why does he think you’re all but the devil incarnate?”

“I’m…Troubled,” he says softly. A confession. An admission of guilt. A statement of truth that she’s known since she looked up idiopathic neuropathy and realized just how impossible his condition actually is according to any medical law outside of Haven.

It’s not the first time Audrey hears the word ( _Troubled_ , like having a bad day; like being temporarily disturbed; like it’s possible to get over it), but it is the first time she realizes that she wants to make the word obsolete. Wants to take these troubled people and heal them and fix them and make their weather sunny and their dreams peaceful and their music ordinary and their skin warm and sensitive. Wants to take this town and make it a _true_ Haven. Wants to make Nathan realize that he doesn’t have to just stand back and take it, doesn’t have to accept whatever these townspeople dish out to him.

Doesn’t have to believe them when they tell him he’s flawed.

But that’s not something that can be done in a day, or in a week, or even in a month. She’s awfully glad she had so much vacation time stored up, because this is going to take longer than she’d anticipated, but she doesn’t think she can walk away until it’s done.

* * *

Haven also teaches her how to break the rules.

She’s always played fast and loose with the guidelines Agent Howard gave her, but something about this town (something about the look in the eyes of these Troubled people, the desperation and the helplessness and the isolation, like mute pleas for help) makes her even less concerned with the law. Editing her first report to make sure Marion didn’t go to jail was just the beginning—even after almost a month of being in Haven, Audrey’s made only a couple arrests but closed almost a dozen cases.

There’s no reason to lock these people up, she tells herself. What is she going to do? Make a man go to prison for life just because he was angry when he ate his dinner? Lock up a husband who played his wife a tune on the piano? Send a kid to juvenile detention because he dreamed about his parents’ car accident? Put a straitjacket on a man who just found out he was stuffed with rags where there should have been blood and bone and marrow?

No. Locking them up isn’t the answer, and throwing the rulebook and some handcuffs at someone isn’t going to solve their problem. Troubled people don’t need rules (when even the laws of science are beyond them, they’re way past too far gone for the more mundane laws); they need compassion and understanding. They need someone to understand them and reach out a hand anyway. They need a friend. A smile. A listening ear.

It’s not FBI approved at all. In fact, sometimes Audrey lets herself have a laugh over what Agent Howard would think if he were here. He’d told her she could be a great agent if she just tried harder. Well, she’s never tried harder in her life, but she’s pretty sure this isn’t what he had in mind.

“Something funny you want to share with the class?” Duke asks her.

Audrey looks up from the cupcakes he brought her and smiles at him. “Just thinking how far I am from where I ever thought I’d be.”

Duke nods in sagely understanding. “Haven has a way of doing that to the best of us. It pulls you in and even when you think you’ve escaped, you find that it’s really sucked you back under so fast you’d think you were in a riptide.”

“Very philosophical,” Audrey observes gravely, and laughs when Duke rolls his eyes at her.

She likes these moments. When the day’s over and the cases aren’t urgent anymore and she can just relax. Duke is good at making her relax, at making her feel like it’s okay to cut loose and bend the rules (okay, _break_ , but this is Duke so as far as she goes, she knows he’ll always go that bit further, which can only make her look good in comparison) and be a little more lighthearted than normal.

They’re sitting on the patio of what is now his restaurant. He’s been trying to get her to give him some ideas about the remodeling he’s planning, but Audrey hasn’t been paying that much attention (and he should be grateful for that; she lives out of a bag and a motel room, so the Martha Stewart domain isn’t really her turf). Instead she’s been staring out at the ocean, black and silver in the moonlight, and trying to figure out how she got here.

A case.

A newspaper clipping.

A black and white photo.

A mystery.

And the Troubled. (One Troubled in particular, a little voice inside whispers, but she shrugs it to the back of her mind because she’s supposed to be relaxing right now.)

It doesn’t seem like much to bring her here, to this place. An empty restaurant in a strange town with a smuggler sitting at her side drinking beer with their sugary dessert.

“One name,” Audrey muses aloud. “That’s all I’ve got. I’ve been here for weeks, and all I have is one little name that could mean anything.”

“It’s more than you had when you first came here,” Duke reminds her.

Audrey raises an eyebrow. “Is it? When I came here, I knew who I was and what I was good at and where I was going. Now all I have are questions no one will answer and mysteries that lead to more dead ends.”

“Don’t forget me!” Duke interjects with a raised hand, his expression comically offended.

“You?” Audrey grins. “You’re one of those dead-end mysteries I’m talking about.”

“Wow.” Duke shakes his head thoughtfully. “Give me a minute. I’m trying to puzzle out whether there was an insult hidden in that statement anywhere.”

“Not an insult.” Audrey nudges his shoulder with her own. “More like the truth. You could play in much bigger waters than this, Duke, no matter what side of the law you’re on. But here you are, still in town, an outsider by choice and a loner by default. You know more than you’re telling me—you just hide it better with your smiles and banter than anyone else does with their skittish awkwardness.”

“You know,” Duke stares at her, a look almost like admiration in his gaze, which makes something in Audrey’s stomach warm, a pleasant buzz like the thrum of alcohol in her veins. “I think you were made for this town.”

“Yeah?” she asks, because she’s not so sure herself. Sure, she’s solved some cases and helped some people, but she’s not lying about feeling more lost now than when she got here. Learning patience isn’t the same as _having_ patience, and she wants to know who this Lucy is _now_.

“Yeah,” Duke says softly. “You see things the rest of us don’t. And you are, let us not forget, the only cop I have ever liked. That’s achievement enough all on its own, Officer-Agent Parker.”

She laughs and feels a tension inside her ease. Because she likes it here, in these moments where the weight of the world isn’t pressing down on her. Because it’s good to have friends who can make her laugh. Because it’s nice to know that _someone_ thinks she’s doing some good. (And she’ll need this feeling, later, when Duke’s hair goes white and thin and his eyes film over and he still manages to laugh but only with a trace of fear; later, when Nathan stands by her and looks down at the literally-two-day-old baby in his arms and actually, really smiles, before he loses it all when he hands the baby over to a social worker who will take her far away; later, when Duke looks at the picture she snapped of his daughter and pretends he’s okay when he’s anything but, when he’s crumbling on the inside and all that holds him up is the façade he wears like armor.)

“So,” Duke begins again, persistent as ever. “What do you think of the name _The Gray Gull_?”

Audrey laughs and shakes her head and lets the cool wind blow away her worries.

* * *

There’s one thing Haven doesn’t teach her, though, and that’s how to give up. Sure, the cases are sometimes hard to resolve and even trying to figure out what caused the strange things that happen involves thinking so far outside the box it’s hard to even remember there was a cube shape there to begin with at all, but that doesn’t mean she learns how to walk away.

In fact, on the contrary, she learns how to hold on even tighter. Before, if a case couldn’t be solved, she’d walk away (reluctantly and with a feeling of disappointment in herself that made her feel old and worn and lesser) and leave it for another law enforcement officer to pick up the trail another day. But here…here there’s just her. Just her, because the other cops are Havenites, which means they look the other way and pretend that nothing supernatural ever happens in their town. Just her, because Garland Wuornos stands in her office with its extra desk and its dark blinds, and spitballs ideas with her (with many muttered complaints and the general impression that she’s twisting his arm to make him stand there and help her think things through, when he’s the one who chooses to come in and ask her what she’s working on), but he always clams up and stumps away whenever she asks him anything that makes him feel like she’s crossed whatever line he’s drawn.

Just her, because for some reason, she feels responsible for these Troubled.

Feels as if she’s their only hope.

Maybe it’s stupid and maybe Duke would laugh at her for it (okay, _definitely_ he would laugh at her for it), but she feels it nonetheless. She’s used to feeling responsible; she just isn’t used to feeling… _solely_ responsible.

“How exactly did you figure that girl’s drawings were the key?” Garland asks her, staring down at the sketches she’s holding (as carefully as if they’re ticking bombs) in her arms.

“Took me a while,” Audrey admits, and wonders if she would have figured it out faster if Nathan had been answering his phone and picking her up like he’s supposed to. If he was, maybe she would have remembered earlier that she’d seen charcoal for sale in the art shop where he picks up mysterious supplies (“They sell ink and stuff,” he’d said when she’d asked him why they were stopping, but he’d picked up his package awfully quickly and he hadn’t let the saleslady get a word in edgewise, so she suspects he’s hiding some hobby or another; she’ll get it out of him eventually). But Nathan’s a touchy subject where the chief’s concerned, and Audrey doesn’t feel like mentioning Nathan right now anyway (not since he’s disappeared on her these past two days, and she’s seriously considering moving him down to number two on her speed-dial), so she just shrugs. “Anyway, at least we got the drawings back safely.”

“And only one town landmark as a casualty,” Garland says dryly.

Audrey rolls her eyes at him. “I’d like to have seen you get the drawings away any faster.”

“All right,” the chief irritably concedes. “So Crocker wasn’t exactly useless. I still don’t see why that means I should ‘lose’ one of his parking tickets.”

“Quid pro quo,” she replies in her best imitation of him, and almost drops her jaw in shock when a hearty laugh escapes the stolid man in front of her (the man she’d have sworn hadn’t laughed in decades at the least).

“I’ll see what I can do,” he finally agrees. “But no promises—the man’s still a smuggler.”

Audrey nods and sets the sketches down on her desk, not quite sure what to do with them.

“Eleanor’s got a nice place.”

Audrey glances over her shoulder to see Garland still standing in the doorway.

“Lots of room,” he elaborates shortly, and for the first time, Audrey thinks she sees a glimpse of familial connection between the monosyllabic man before her and the one working at the _Haven Herald_.

“You think she’ll be able to keep these safe?” she asks.

A strange look passes over his face, there and gone faster than she can blink. “It wouldn’t be the first thing she’s protected. Besides,” he adds, the surly note she’s come to know so well back in his voice, “at least _she’s_ part of the police department.”

A frown twists Audrey’s lips. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Garland turns and confronts her head on, short and bluff and so solid that she can’t imagine being able to get through him to escape out the door. His thick brows are drawn down over icy eyes, and in keeping with what passes for normal around here, she can’t quite read his expression. “Have you ever stopped and considered the fact that you never call HPD when you’re in trouble or you need back-up? If there’s trouble or a break in a case, you don’t call me. The fact is, even when presented with other options, you always choose to call either a low-life smuggler or a mediocre reporter. It’s not exactly inspiring to those of us here.”

“I thought I was only on temporary loan here,” she retorts hotly, “and that reporter is your son!”

“Maybe so,” Garland says (but he breaks her stare, looks away, the first sign of a chink in his attack), “but he’s not a cop. He’s a reporter, and reporters and cops are notorious for bad relations.”

“Nathan’s never used what he’s learned with me to get a scoop for the paper,” Audrey says, and only realizes it’s true after she says it aloud. She’s read every one of his informative, matter-of-fact articles since she’s decided to stay, and never once has anything graced the _Herald_ that the HPD hasn’t approved.

Garland studies her for a long, silent moment, charged with tension and meanings she doesn’t understand. He looks at her as if he thinks he’s proved his point, as if he’s waiting for her to concede. But she doesn’t (because even before coming to Haven, she wasn’t very good at giving up). “Well, maybe,” he says slowly, biting the words off, “you might want to consider the reason for that.”

And then he turns and stomps off, back to his office where he’ll sit in the dark and look through paperwork and ignore her until the next time he gets the urge to come hover over her and bother her with dour pronouncements and inexplicable arguments.

Audrey glares after him for a while, does some muttering of her own, but eventually finds herself looking down at the sketches (the one of Nathan, left behind in Vicki’s gallery, sits on top, staring toward the door where Garland stood moments before). “What,” she wonders, “was that all about?”

But as dangerous as the pictures are, they aren’t really alive and there’s no answer. Typical, she thinks, because silence is probably as much of an answer as the real Nathan would give her.

If he were here.

But he’s not. And so with a huff, Audrey turns the sketch over ( _very_ gently) and sets to the excruciating task of falsifying all the paperwork she needs to file for this latest round of the strange and everyday in Haven, Maine.

* * *

“I thought you’d forgotten about me,” Audrey says when she sees Nathan leaning up against his Bronco, parked in front of her motel. She slams the door of the patrol car behind her with (maybe) a bit more force than is necessarily required. Belatedly, she waves at the driver and adds a, “Thanks, Stu.”

“Sure, Audrey,” the cheerful officer replies, and drives away without a backward look. Though he does, Audrey notices with pleased surprise, give Nathan a half-wave (more of a greeting than Nathan gets from anyone besides Garland, who lectures him or ignores him depending on the day, or Duke, who never passes up a chance to rile the journalist) on his way out the gravel driveway.

Nathan watches him go, then looks back at Audrey with an arched eyebrow. “Thought his name was Stan.”

“Stu, Stan,” Audrey waves her hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t have to try to remember his name if _someone_ had been answering his phone.”

“You do realize that, all teasing aside, I’m not _actually_ your chauffeur,” Nathan observes, and Audrey has to stop and give him a second, closer look. That had sounded almost…droll…and while Nathan is a master of the sarcastic, an expert with the dry, and a certifiable genius at the unspoken, he’s never before shown any flair for the outright humorous.

So, rewarding his daring with a smile, she hangs her jacket over her arm, folds her arms across her chest, and leans against the sun-warmed Bronco, a mere inch or so between them. “All right,” she says. “I’ll bite—what’s all this?”

He arches that eloquent brow again but says nothing. The slight, almost-but-not-quite hidden twinkle in his eyes speaks for him (because for all she’s picked up some of his habits, he’s picked up some of hers too, and it’s no longer like looking for a needle in a haystack to be able to pick out the hints that betray he’s actually physically capable of smiling).

“ _This_ ,” Audrey elaborates. “You know what I mean. You’re…almost cheerful. And okay, yes, I was a bit surprised to have to find a ride into the station this morning—making myself late by a good ten minutes, I’ll have you know, and without any coffee—not to mention the lack of returned phone calls yesterday, so I think I’m entitled to a bit of healthy curiosity.”

“I agree,” Nathan says gravely. “And I am sorry about this morning.”

“Well…” Audrey trails off, though, because now that everything’s said out loud and is out in the open, she can’t quite figure out _why_ he’s apologizing. She’s gotten used to being able to rely on him, but he’s right—they’ve never agreed that he’ll _always_ be there to run her errands and drive her around. It’s not like she’d even thought to really verify with him that he’d be there for her this morning. So…so why _is_ he apologizing? (Why is some latent spark of hurt anger inside her mollified by the apology?)

“I know it’s late,” he says, as if he doesn’t notice her close perusal of him, “but here.” Swiveling, he reaches through the Bronco’s open window and pulls out a coffee cup, then proffers it to her.

Audrey stares at it a long moment. There’s something in her throat. Something thick and lumpy (but _not_ a lump, because it’s just a cup of coffee for crying out loud, and there’s no reason to get all maudlin over it). Something that makes it hard to breathe, hard to swallow. Hard to look up at the earnest, sober eyes of this man who seems just a little bit unreal (in a way that has nothing to do with what he can or cannot feel).

“I don’t…” Nathan shifts his weight, his hand wavering a bit as she fails to take the drink from him. “I’m not sure, but I think it’s probably cool enough to drink by now. I’ve been waiting for you for a while.”

“Th-thank you,” Audrey manages past the thing-that-is-not-a-lump stuck in her throat, and she pretends her hand isn’t shaking when she reaches out and takes the lukewarm cup of black coffee from him. “You didn’t have to do that.” He shrinks inward a bit, so she hastily adds, “But who am I kidding? We all know I live on caffeine and sugar.”

His lips quirk in that almost-smile of his. “Right.”

“So,” she says again, sipping from the Styrofoam cup even though it’s warm and sunny out and she doesn’t particularly feel like coffee (it’s dark and bitter, just like he knows she likes it). “Had to rush off for one of your ambushes this morning?”

“Something like that,” he agrees. She’s already opened her mouth to prod him (because he never tells her a full story without making her drag it out of him phrase by phrase), but to her surprise, he continues before she can speak. “Dave wanted me to interview a woman who’s been etching witch symbols around her property and being a bit outspoken about animal rights. I was doing the research yesterday, and I made an appointment with her this morning. I planned on coming and picking you up afterward, but she was actually there, and she agreed to the interview, so…so I didn’t get there in time.”

Audrey’s impressed with herself. Nathan Wuornos has just spilled out more than a dozen words in front of her—without prodding or manipulation or begging or blackmail—and her jaw has _not_ dropped beyond anatomically possible distances. In fact, she thinks she keeps her aplomb remarkably well. “I see,” she says, and maybe she smirks a bit, but she figures she’s allowed (it’s certainly better than giving into what she actually wants to do and berating him for being surprised that someone actually agreed to talk to him). “Am I allowed to ask for this woman’s name? She didn’t turn out to be a witch, I’m assuming.”

“Jess Minnion,” Nathan answers promptly, and Audrey gives him another look. That answer was just a bit _too_ prompt.

“Must have really made an impression on you,” she comments, then grins. “So maybe she _is_ a witch! You’re not holding out on me, Wuornos, are you?”

He rolls his eyes. “Not a witch. She was just trying to keep the hunting club nearby from trespassing on her land, and she has some…strange…ideas about how to accomplish that in this kind of town.”

“Huh.” Audrey leans back against the car, feels Nathan lean beside her, a comfortable form radiating more heat than the vehicle at her back. “So are you going to see her again?”

“I already wrote the article,” he replies neutrally. “It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper.”

“Uh-huh.” Audrey takes another sip of her coffee, and inexplicably, she finds herself wondering if she’ll have to get used to getting her own morning drinks from now on. Nathan might be busy picking up coffees for someone else. He deserves it, she reminds herself. It’s about time someone in this crazy town realizes he’s a man, with feelings and ideals and sea-blue eyes and the right to more than he’s yet been given. “Did you at least get her number? In case you have any follow-up questions?”

Nathan gives her a look out of the corner of his eye. “What are you saying, Parker?”

His uncharacteristic bluntness takes Audrey aback, but only for an instant. “I’m saying you met a woman who actually seems to have made a dent in your stoic, monosyllabic exterior, not to mention deigned to acknowledge your existence. I’m saying I hope you’re not so hopelessly out of tune with the way things work that you didn’t think to at least get a way of contacting her again. You know, for when you get up the courage to ask her out.”

She expects him to roll his eyes again. Expects him to huff and prevaricate and stand there companionably with her for a while more. Expects him to maybe give his almost-smile and shyly ask her if she thinks he should.

She doesn’t expect him to go cold. Still (he’s always still, but not like this, not like even breathing too deeply will make him shatter into a million, billion pieces). Silent.

She doesn’t expect him to close up tighter than Fort Knox and clench his jaw so hard she’s afraid he’ll chip a tooth.

“Nathan?” she asks. She stands up straight, faces him. She wants to touch him (her hand hovers between them), but there’s tension radiating outward from him like electricity, his own private force field generated by sheer force of will.

It takes a minute, but finally he meets her eyes (and she wishes he hadn’t, because there’s always _something_ in his eyes when he’s with her, some twinkle or expectation or perplexity, but now there’s only a deadness, as blank as his own skin feels to him). “You don’t understand,” he says quietly, and now she knows what _real_ neutrality sounds like. “She did show up and she did talk to me and she is beautiful, but…but I’m me, and what use is there in starting something you can’t finish? What use is there in pretending?”

Oh.

_Oh_.

Audrey stares at him, unable to look away, and wonders how she gets herself into these situations. She feels like blurting out, “Awkward,” and moving on, but she can’t. Nathan’s rigid and stiff, but he’s bared himself to her, and even if he can’t feel, he can still hurt. So she leans back against the Bronco, right next to him, and lets out a quiet breath. She can’t apologize (because he’d get the wrong idea, she knows he would), and she can’t empathize (because he’d run fast enough to leave a dust trail hanging in the air behind him), and she can’t do what she _really_ wants to do and pull him into a hug (because he flinched away from her the last time she tried to touch him, and she’s already come close enough to crying today).

So she just stands there and lets the silence wrap around them. Around them _both_. Not just him, but him and her. Because maybe he was alone before she got here, and maybe he’ll always feel that extra bit isolated due to his affliction—but she’s here now. She’s here, and she’s not going to walk away or fail to show up to any appointment they make or ignore him or pretend like he’s not in the room (because yes, it took her a day or two to figure it out, but she knows now what he was waiting for that first day they met, knows he was just waiting for her to close up and shut him down like everyone else does, but if he’s still waiting for that, then he’s going to be waiting until the skies turn to fire and the world disappears beneath their feet).

He’s not alone anymore.

Eventually he relaxes, tension easing out of him a fraction at a time, until the unnatural stillness drains from him, until his warmth returns, until that deadness fades from his eyes (leaving something caught between awe and gratefulness in its place). And it’s then, even when they’re not saying anything, even when they’re just standing out in a parking lot beneath a too-warm sun, that Audrey realizes _she’s_ not alone either.

“Thanks for the coffee,” she says quietly, and that’s all. But it’s enough.


	3. Chapter 3

She meets Jess Minnion only a couple days later, at a hospital where a group of grieving family members meet to try to find comfort in each other (misery really does love company, she thinks cynically). She’s not sure what she expected of the woman that actually made Nathan string more than five words together, but Jess surprises her anyway. Tall and dark and exotic with more than a trace of a Quebec accent, she’s also kind and witty and obviously somewhat selfless if she’s devoting her time to helping at the hospital, and if Nathan has a type, at least he aims high.

Not that the meeting ends up being all that pleasant. She wants to talk to the family members, Jess doesn’t think it’s a great idea, Audrey overrules her, and before she knows it, she’s convincing Garland to help her with an exhumation order, family members are out for her blood, Jess is complaining about the setbacks in therapy, and Audrey finds herself trapped in the dark police station, trying to hide from shadows.

“Can you see it?” Dave calls out in what is very obviously _not_ a whisper but just as obviously is _supposed_ to be one.

“No, I can’t see it!” Audrey snaps back. Of all the times for the two old coots to come visit her, they had to pick now! Sure, she’s grateful for their help picking out that dress she wore to the _Second Chance’s_ reopening, and all right, so their odd manners and weird looks have kind of grown on her since their first meeting, but the last thing she needs is them trapped in here with her. “How exactly do you think I would spot one specific shadow in the dark?”

“You did say you had a handbook,” Vince points out, and she wishes she could tell if he was joking or not.

“Okay,” Audrey whispers to herself, deciding to ignore the Teagues brothers until there’s no other choice. “Okay, there’s got to be a way out of here. It’s a shadow. So that means I can… Yeah, it’s a _shadow_.”

All right, so brainstorming isn’t exactly helping her any. A shadow doesn’t have form, doesn’t have substance, doesn’t pose danger to physical beings, and—oh yes!— _doesn’t kill people!_ But this is Haven, so the rules don’t apply, so…so here they are. Trapped with a light she can’t reach the switch to now casting a no man’s land between her and the exit door.

Flickers of black swoop along the edges of her vision; she’s not sure if she’s imagining them or if the shadow’s getting antsy. Maybe it has a bedtime.

“All right!” she suddenly exclaims. “I have an idea!”

Vince and Dave pause in their flurry of whispers (probably an argument; the two are always arguing over something or other) and turn almost identical expressions of expectation toward her. Crouched in a corner with their limbs splayed out against the walls, they look just as peculiar as normal, and yet…there’s something almost eerie in the way they seem to be waiting for her to give them an escape. As if they don’t doubt her at all. As if they are certain only she can come up with the answer. She’d shrug it off as them deferring to the cop in the room, but…but they’ve always looked at her as if they _know_ her. As if they’re waiting for her to turn into someone or something. (As if they knew the woman in the newspaper clipping and think Audrey can lead them back to her.)

“What is it?” Dave finally whisper-shouts.

“Hold on,” Audrey says, tugging her cell-phone out of her pocket. “This’ll just take a second.”

She pushes down the number one on her speed-dial (she never did get around to bumping him down the list) and impatiently waits for the static rings to sound.

“Hello?”

“Nathan!” she exclaims, and doesn’t even bother to wonder about the smile springing to her lips. “I need you—we’re trapped at the police station! It’s the shadow; there’s a light by the door that I can’t get to and—”

She definitely doesn’t imagine the rapid movement of a black form hurtling through the spaces of light, chasms of gold carved out between rifts of darkness. She jerks her weapon up (though what good a bullet is going to do to incorporeal impossibility, she’s not quite sure) and fires a single shot. Unfortunately, her phone gets lost in the movement and slides beneath a desk. She could maybe dive for it, but…but there’s the tiniest sliver of light edging its way under that desk, and maybe her life isn’t worth a few more words with Nathan.

Maybe.

Assuming he heard enough to be on his way over.

The shadow goes quiescent again, a malicious force oozing through streams of light, waiting, infinitely patient. Audrey stares at the shafts of shadowplay against the door, straining her eyes until they’re so dry she’s afraid to blink lest she take a layer off her eyeballs.

“You called Nathan?” Vince asks, unexpectedly. He speaks low and deep, but not so low that she doesn’t notice the harshness of his tone. Cold and bleak and maybe a bit more ruthless than she wants to believe one of these two old guys can be.

Audrey turns her head and looks over at the brothers. For a change, only one of them is staring—Vince, his eyes fixed and intent, like a bird of prey watching its next meal. Dave, on the other hand, is busy studying his camera. He acts as if he cannot hear them talking at all.

“Yeah,” she settles for saying. “He’s only a couple minutes away and he’ll know what to do.”

He’ll know what to do because she was discussing the case with him earlier when they met for lunch, she thinks with a twinge of guilt. Ever since Garland pointed out just how little she interacts with the rest of the HPD, she’s been noticing how much time she spends with Nathan. But really, who cares? Like she told Garland, Nathan doesn’t write any stories that interfere with police business or publicize confidential facts (not that he _could_ write about any of these cases without making the _Herald_ look like a tabloid), and he’s good at helping her piece together the clues into something that makes Haven-sense. Good at giving her a particular unimpressed look when he thinks she’s grasping at straws or reaching too far. Good at quirking a skeptical eyebrow when she gets too far ahead of herself. Good at letting that hint of a smile break through when they finally come to a conclusion that makes the whole case _click_ together.

He’s her friend, and he’s discreet, and she doesn’t care if Garland and Duke and Vince all look at her as if she’s lost her mind, she’s not going to stop talking to him.

“Audrey,” Vince begins, and she can already tell he’s about to lecture her. “Nathan Wuornos is a fine reporter, of course—”

“We wouldn’t keep him on if he weren’t,” Dave says conciliatorily, but Audrey frowns at the tint of sarcasm underlying the statement.

Vince glares at his brother. “But,” he continues, “he’s made some mistakes that are hard for quite a few townspeople to overlook.”

“Like what?” Audrey challenges him. Maybe this little nighttime stalemate will turn out to be a good thing if it means she can finally get some answers. Maybe she’ll finally figure out what it is about a quiet man with a hidden smile that sets a whole town on edge.

Vince’s eyes narrow, dark pits that seem to suck in the light. Dave reaches out and tugs on his sleeve, hissing something low and emphatic, but Vince ignores him. “Let’s just say,” the younger Teague brother finally says, “that he was offered a position, and he didn’t take it, which meant turning his back on a lot of people who were depending on him.”

Audrey gapes at him, not even making an effort to hide her disbelief. “A job opportunity? _That’s_ what this is about? So he turns down Career Day and that makes him a pariah? Even for Haven, that’s stretching credulity a bit, don’t you think?”

Dave takes a breath as if he’s going to speak, but suddenly the front door bursts open (a tall, lean form silhouetted against the landscape of desks and chairs and brick columns), a single shot rings out startlingly loud in the station’s almost-empty confines, and the light is gone.

“Parker?”

Shadows flee.

Tingles, like pins and needles in limbs that have lost all feeling, spread through her body as she sags for an instant in relief, letting her hand with the gun slide to her side. Nathan’s voice resounds through the station, coated with worry, roughened and made ragged by fear and a hint of desperation, swallowed up by wood and brick.

“Parker!”

“I’m here,” she says and steps out of her hiding place, heedless of the lights from outside still glimmering in the windows. And before she can give her eyes time to adjust, before those warm, prickly tingles go away, she’s stepping forward, holstering her gun, maneuvering around desks by memory. She hears Nathan moving too, and she moves faster because she doesn’t want him to run into anything and cause bruises he won’t notice.

“Nathan,” she says, then his form is right in front of her, all edges and lines and warm, familiar jacket.

They pause for an instant.

She can smell the scent that infuses the Bronco’s interior, that follows him around everywhere, that has come to mean comfort and friendship and support—sea air and a hint of maple syrup and newspaper ink and something even more that she’s never been able to define (and she wonders what _he_ smells around her, this man who cannot feel and yet can sense everything else so deeply, so intuitively, that it continually astounds her).

She can see his free hand, limp at his side (where _did_ he get the gun he’s holding?), and it’s dark and close and she feels almost lightheaded, but she is certain his hand is trembling.

She wants to hug him. She wants to step forward, close the gap between them, and throw her arms around his neck, and let him smell her and see her and hear her breathing to let him know she is there (because she has never heard his voice like that, all broken and terrified). She wants to lean into his strength and soak up some of it for herself, let it crash around her and through her until she can stand up straight again and find a way to trap a shadow.

But he is afraid of touch. He is afraid of people being near him. He is afraid of his isolation being threatened with new and unfamiliar and strange. And if there is one thing Audrey does not want, it is for Nathan to be afraid of her.

So she waits. A second. Another second. Another.

But no longer.

Nathan lets out a breath, and the gun clatters to the floor as he steps forward. “Audrey,” he whispers (breathes out, sighs, exclaims, some mixture of them all that sends fireworks exploding in the pit of her stomach). And he opens his arms and envelops her in his embrace.

Audrey falls against him, closes her eyes, and lets herself, for one tiny moment, forget the rest of the world. Forget everything but _this_.

* * *

_This._

He’s solid against her.

He’s real in her arms.

His heart stutters against her cheek, dampened by fabric and skin and distance but still strong and important and so _necessary_ that she can feel it anyway.

He holds her carefully, gently, as if he is afraid she will break beneath his touch. As if he thinks he will misjudge his own strength and the pressure he exerts and hurt her. As if he never thought he would get to have this. To hug. To embrace. To know he is not alone.

She has her face buried in his shirt, and she tries to imagine what a hug feels like for him, but she can’t. She can’t because she’s too overwhelmed, too caught up in the moment herself to think about anything but that she’s wanted to do this for so long.

She’s only had a handful of hugs in her life, but she doesn’t need a lot to know this is a good one.

She lets out a shuddering breath (and why is she so weak, so tremulous right now? It’s not like they were in _that_ much danger; certainly she’s faced worse!) and rubs her nose against his shirt, still cold from the outside air. Then, because _she_ can feel, she splays her hands out against his neck, lets her fingers disappear beneath the fringe of his hair.

He gasps.

Lets go.

Stumbles back.

There’s pure, unadulterated shock written all across his face. She has never seen his eyes so blue before, touched in shadows.

(She has never seen him look so lost.)

* * *

The Teagues brothers stumble over to them, bumping into desks and arguing between themselves (just a bit too loud, a bit too conspicuous). They reach Audrey and Nathan (frozen with a foot of distance yawning open between them), then stand there, expectantly, waiting. For once they don’t say anything, but Nathan shuts down so fast Audrey wonders if she imagined the past minute and a half (it is Haven, after all, where anything is possible).

“Everyone okay?” Audrey asks, just for something to say.

“Fine,” Vince says.

“Sure, yeah,” Dave says right on top of him.

Nathan doesn’t answer (she doesn’t think he’s anywhere near fine).

Vince breaks the awkward moment by tilting his head and studying Nathan. “Where’d you find a gun?”

“My dad’s,” Nathan replies shortly before bending and scooping it up from where he dropped it. He turns and strides out of the station, so fast Audrey has to run to catch up to him.

“Wait!” she calls. “Nathan, wait!”

Without thinking, she reaches out and grabs hold of his wrist.

He whirls so fast she stumbles backward. He stands in a patch of darkness, but she can see him holding his arm against his chest as if he’s been shot (except even if he had been, he wouldn’t stand like that, hunched in around himself, vulnerable and hurt and trying so futilely to protect himself).

“Nathan?” she asks. Softly. Tentatively. As gently as if talking down a man on a ledge.

There is a catch to his voice when he murmurs, “Sorry.”

“Nathan, what’s going on?”

“You…” He pauses, swallows, looks away—in short, does everything to make Audrey want to shake him. “We have a shadow to catch.”

* * *

It takes a few minutes of explaining the situation to Nathan and hearing him make replies back to her (somehow ordering them in a way that lets it all make sense) before she puts the pieces together. It takes an hour to set up their plan and confront the blind man and lure the shadow away. She’s nervous and uncertain, nerves jangling along her veins like fractured lightning, setting her fingertips and brain afire. It’s dangerous, letting Nathan stay with the blind man (and why, oh, why didn’t she call Stu or Stan or Frank or whatever his name is to back the journalist up?), knowing that he could be hurt. Shadows don’t move on their own, so if one is and does, then how can she be sure how fast the thing can move? What if it can instantly appear back in its rightful place, ready to kill again once she chases it away with bright flashes and time-released cameras?

But Nathan calls her long moments after she’s faced down the incorporeal killer and tells her it is back with its owner, and he’s received as near a confession as they ever get with the Troubled, and Audrey feels latent electricity pour out of her fingertips, the soles of her feet, the exhalation of her breath, pooling in the empty, brightly lit interview room like stagnant fear.

Not that she can call it that. Not that she’d admit it.

For a brief moment, she wishes Duke were with her. He’d be able to say something to lighten the tension and diffuse the moment. He might even take pity on her and let slip some other hint that will let her puzzle out whatever happened between her and Nathan. What it was that made him look at her as if she were some potent mix between a redeeming angel and fiery Hell itself.

But Duke isn’t here, and Garland is, stumping in just before she can leave and go make sure with her own eyes that Nathan is okay (go ask him questions and prod him until he spills the answers between them, solid and concrete enough for her to hold and fix and make all right). The chief blusters and blows like always, but she mentions Nathan, alone with their perpetrator, and he lets her go, only narrowed eyes and an extra edge of hoarseness to his voice betraying the concern she knows he feels but hardly ever glimpses.

It’s a sad ending to a case, locking up a man who doesn’t even know he’s guilty. A man who thought he was made better, now trapped with the very shadows of his soul that he’d wanted expunged. He can’t see, but Audrey feels guilty anyway, shutting the door on a house of darkness. But what else can she do? Troubled get their name for a reason, and happy endings aren’t always as easy as a boat on the sea out of hearing distance or a boy on sleeping pills or a girl who has to put her drawing pencils away.

Sometimes, she can’t fix the problem; she can only try to control it to the best of her ability. That’s another lesson Haven has taught her, and it’s not her favorite. Not by a long shot.

“How long do you think we’ll have to leave him in there?” Nathan asks when she finishes posting the ‘do not disturb’ signs and joins him at their place (leaning up against the side of the Bronco, side by side because even when he’s holding himself back he doesn’t leave). He doesn’t look at her, his arms are tightly folded across his chest, and he couldn’t be more obvious if he’d put up his own ‘do not disturb’ sign.

“I don’t know,” Audrey lies, because there isn’t an easy answer to that. It’s too heartless to say there’s no end in sight. Too much of a lie to say that the isolation won’t last long, a falsehood too cruel to give to both the blind man and Nathan himself, looking for answers without asking the question out loud (because it hurts too much, no matter how mute his nerve endings might be). “He’ll still be able to have visitors.”

“He’ll just always be in the dark,” Nathan finishes for her. For an instant, brief and quick and heart-stopping, she thinks he’s going to meet her eyes. But then he flinches and his gaze drops back to his feet, and Audrey lets out her breath in a sigh of disappointment.

And she should push the issue, she knows she should, but he’s never pushed a single issue with her that she hasn’t wanted him to (even when she’s given him plenty of cause), so she settles back against the blue siding of his vehicle, and doesn’t say a word.

It’s broad daylight, the sun is gold and topaz and heavy like a shawl on her shoulders, but the blind man isn’t the only one in the dark.

* * *

Duke and Garland and the Teagues and Eleanor Carr throw her a birthday party on Carpenter’s Knot. It’s the first birthday party she’s ever had, and Audrey is embarrassed and pleased and strangely touched. But not too touched to shrug Duke off and go looking for the caretaker to ask him about the look he’d given her, the way he’d talked to her (seeing Lucy in her, talking to Lucy even though she was long gone and Audrey’s the one who’s left, desperate for answers that only seem to slip further and further away the harder she grasps for them).

“Please,” she begs the man. “I know you recognized me. I know you knew Lucy. So please, _please_ , just tell me about her. I think she might be my mom.”

“Your mother,” he says, tilting his head. He is nervous, jumpy, wringing his hands together, backing away from her. She doesn’t stop following him, though, even when he ducks into a dark room in the basement. It’s cold and dank down here and she hasn’t opened any of her presents or eaten a piece of the cake or caught more than a glimpse of Nathan, lurking outside the room where they’d surprised her and casting her a distant almost-smile. But the man in front of her knows something, and he is not as impassive, not as impervious, as the Teagues or Garland or Eleanor. So she presses forward.

“Your mother,” the man says again, and then he sighs and shakes his head. His movements stop, leaving him standing in the middle of the room, worn and old and defeated. “She helped me. Really, she did. She’s the only reason I’m here. She always had a way of helping…us.”

“The Troubled?” Audrey whispers. She cannot believe she is actually getting answers. She cannot believe that she is standing here, in an all-but-abandoned hotel in the middle of a thunderstorm, playing hooky at her own birthday party, and finally, _finally_ , getting to hear about the mother she’s thought about so much since arriving in town. It is surreal, dreamlike, and she blames that for her slow reaction time. “She helped the Troubled?”

“She helped me,” Carpenter says again, then he leaps for her, and instead of blowing out birthday candles, Audrey finds her own mind blown out, flickers of painful light bursting and sparking before fading into wispy smoke.

Dreams trouble her, memories pulled out and twisted one way and then another, spiraling in front of her, away from her. Memories and mannerisms and she hears herself saying, “Audrey Prudence Parker, self-inflicted at my confirmation,” and then she thinks there is an echo because someone else says it, but the memory drifts away and instead she is thrust into moments of police work and investigation, and she feels cramped and confined and breathless.

Her head aches, pounding in tempo with her heartbeat (sluggish and breakneck by turns), until she wants to pound her fists against whatever is closest and scream and scream and scream ( _“I’m here! I’m here! I’m here!”_ like some sort of Who from Whoville) until her throat is raw and hoarse.

But she can’t and so instead she drifts in memories.

She remembers a hug. A dark station, reflections of lights in the window, a gun at her feet like an absurd offering, and arms that wrapped around her like never before.

She remembers shock and disbelief and fear and wonder all mixed up into one expression that sat so oddly on the lean face of her stoic journalist as he stumbled away from her.

She remembers…

She remembers.

And then she wakes up.

* * *

“Audrey! Audrey!” Nathan is whispering her name over and over again ( _Audrey_ , not _Parker,_ and it’s odd; not unpleasant, just…different), and he’s holding her hand, and his eyes are closed, dark lashes hiding sea-blue eyes. It’s the first thing she sees, when she opens her eyes—Nathan at her side, clutching her hand as if he can feel it, all his smiles and almost-smiles and hidden twinkles dried up and dissipated until there is only something broken and hollow left at her side.

“She’s okay!” Duke exclaims suddenly, his voice loud and jarring but not unwelcome. “Nathan, she’s awake!”

Audrey’s head lolls, but fingers catch her, hold her up, and she relaxes, trusting herself to Duke’s steady smuggler hands.

Nathan has gone silent (she wishes he would say her name again, _Audrey_ or _Parker_ , she doesn’t care, just so long as he speaks to her). He does not look up. But he does not let go of her hand either (his fingers curl completely over hers, and he is so much warmer than her, like a piece of the sun burning against her palm, and she does not want to lose this feeling even as she feels guilty for knowing that it’s selfish, to want something from him that gives nothing to him in return).

“Crying will not be tolerated,” she murmurs, her throat hoarse and her tongue swollen in her mouth, sitting restlessly behind unyielding teeth. “Birthday parties get maudlin when there’s crying involved.”

Duke chuckles, a weak exhalation in her ear, stirring her hair, and his hands are infinitely gentle against her brow.

Finally, Nathan looks up. Meets her gaze. His own is dark and haunted, and she does not like this look on him. Does not like that it is she who put it there. (Does not like realizing that if she did die, he would have no one, nothing at all, only isolation and loneliness in a town that treats him like a ghost come back to haunt his life even before he leaves it.)

“Parker,” he says, and there is no reason for her heart to flutter at the sound of her name in his voice. No reason for a smile to quirk her lips. No reason for her hand to squeeze his weakly in a vain attempt to let him feel something. No reason to react to that one word reluctantly spilling from his lips.

No reason at all, but it happens anyway.

* * *

Her presents are all in the back of her silver rental (she’d driven it to Duke’s boat to meet him when he lured her out to the _Cape Rouge_ under false pretenses; she’s learned to avoid bringing Nathan anywhere near the civilized smuggler), Duke’s gift is still clutched in her hand, warm from the friction of her grip and the weight of her shock, and his words still echo in her ears.

“I was that boy,” he said, as if he were not dropping a bombshell. As if he were not pulling the rug out from under her. Two people in this town she’s trusted and thought were right with her in discovering the depths of secrets hidden in this forgotten pocket of Maine coastline. Two people, but now that number has shrunk to one, and she knows Duke is not law-abiding, not honest, not scrupulous, but this betrayal hurts and stings as if bees have crawled under her skin and taken up hostile residence in her heart.

The boy in the newspaper clipping, and a locket with initials on it.

L.R.

Lucy Ripley.

Another name and the revelation the chameleon had dropped before attacking—more than she’s had in weeks and yet still so very, very little.

“You okay, Parker?” Nathan ambles up to her, hands in his pockets, as if her world has not just been shaken to its foundations. As if she is not still recovering from the aftereffects of her birthday party and having her life stolen from her, even if just for several hours, and hearing that Eleanor Carr is dead so soon after promising to help her. As if this is just a normal Saturday (and she is reminded, poignantly, of their first meeting, of staring down at automotive debris and moving on easily because the strange and the unexplained aren’t anything to get upset over).

“Well, you know,” she says, trying to keep her voice light, wrapping her arms around herself, “it’s been one of those kind of days.”

Nathan leans against the hood of her car and studies her, closely, intently. There’s a foot of distance between them; Audrey notices it and is grateful for it. She needs distance and space right now, if only to ensure she doesn’t start crying. “I’m sorry your party didn’t work out.”

Her laugh almost frightens her, it is so ragged. “Yeah, maybe I should be thankful I’ve never had one before.”

His shrug is purposely light (she gets the sudden feeling that he is trying to calm her, placate her by any means necessary; that he is doing his awkward, clumsy best to comfort her in the only way he knows how). “Maybe so. I’ve always preferred pancakes over birthday cake anyway.”

This time, her laugh is a bit more real, and her arms loosen a bit from their tight position. “I might agree with you if it weren’t for the frosting.”

“Good thing I saved my present back, then,” Nathan says, and there is a hint of smugness in his voice, a flicker of a twinkle in his eyes (and if it’s forced, well, Audrey doesn’t look too closely). He turns and walks over to his Bronco, takes a box from the front seat, then walks back to her. “For you,” he says simply.

Audrey opens the box, and inside, all blue and white and covered with sprinkles, are a dozen cupcakes. She laughs again (and this laugh has a hint of tears sprinkled in it, but they are no longer tears that will rip her in half or fill her with emptiness). “You know me so well,” she says.

Nathan’s eyes never leave hers, his scrutiny so intense that she feels it almost as if he is reaching out a hand and touching her (and she wonders if _she_ can do this for him, look at him so deeply that he can feel it, a touch that can pierce through the haze of isolation his Trouble inflicts on him). “Starting to,” he says softly. “Besides, I already got you winter wear and a Black Bears mug—couldn’t really top all that.”

“True,” she says, and almost forgets the locket now in her pocket in favor of memories of the day he dragged her to the _Herald_ office and bedecked her in winter hat and gloves and boots and handed her the mug she keeps at her office in the station so she can use it every day (a splash of Nathan in an area otherwise devoid of him). “But the cupcakes are a good runner-up.”

He gives a slight nod.

Audrey focuses on closing the box again, making sure she doesn’t tilt the box and smush the frosting. “So,” she begins casually (she didn’t think she was up to discussing this yet, but she feels better so now she is brimming with curiosity), “how did you know the chameleon wasn’t me? Garland says you actually shot him. Her. Whatever.”

Since she’s come to Haven, Nathan has been with her every step of the way. He was reluctant to believe her when she told him Marion Caldwell could control the weather. He scoffed when she said Bobby’s dreams were causing accidents. He rolled his eyes when she jumped to the conclusion that Bill McShaw was poisoning people just by eating while angry. He’s been at her side for every fact she’s learned about her mother, helping where he can and just listening to her rant when he can do nothing else.

He isn’t part of this town’s secrets. He’s as much on the outside as she is, standing side by side with her and looking in and helping her feel not quite so alone when she’s surprised by every day.

But this time, this minute, he looks at her—and there are secrets in his eyes.

She looks away and swallows. “You might know me, but…the chameleon was pretty convincing. Duke claims it had my memories.”

“It did,” Nathan finally says. “But it wasn’t you.”

And she doesn’t know what to say. Because this time, when she looks up, there aren’t secrets in his eyes. There isn’t room for secrets, not with everything else there, boiling up in sea-blue and sky-gray, contained by stoicism and reserve and a lifetime of practice. This time, there is something more, something _else_ , and it makes her look away and swallow heavily for an entirely different reason.

“It wasn’t you,” he said, as if it is as simple as that.

Audrey doesn’t think it’s simple at all (she has never felt as if things are _more_ complicated). But she is holding his box of cupcakes, and she still remembers that look of mingled awe and terror he gave her in the station, and this...this is _harder_ than the Troubled, so she does not know what to do.

“Happy birthday, Audrey,” Nathan says, almost no more than a whisper, almost overwhelmed by the sound of the waves behind him. She thinks he is about to say more, thinks maybe he will spill out what hides behind his enigmatic eyes (but would he spill secrets or that something _else_?), but Garland is headed toward her, determined and resolute, so Nathan fades away as he always does when his father arrives.

(She thinks she feels the brush of his hand against her back, but she must be imagining it because Nathan doesn’t touch anyone.)

The locket burns a hole in her pocket, and her heart feels like weightless lead, but she turns and faces Garland anyway.

Because her mother helped the Troubled too, and because Audrey will not let this town beat her…and because it is easier to face Garland than to watch the last of her two safe havens walk away from her.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you're all enjoying! Here's a new story within the AU season 1 -- I'm a little nervous about it, but hopefully it still seems in-character! Thanks for reading!

“You have to help me,” Duke begs her. She’s never seen him beg before, never seen him not in control (except for when he was old and withered before his time, white hair and wrinkled eyes and faded humor, but even then, she remembers, he still kept up his practiced facades), and it isn’t a look that suits him. Not entirely. It makes him look desperate. Makes him look almost like the smuggler she knows he really is, his mocking exterior hanging from him in fluttering strips.

“Duke,” she says, calmly in an attempt to let it rub off on him, “what do you want me to do? Your babysitter didn’t remember me, you went to talk to her behind my back anyway, you went on a _date_ with her even though she was a suspect, we’re trying to save the world from some kind of apocalypse here, and you’re worried about something that might or might not happen in the future?”

Okay, so she is, perhaps, a little bit exasperated with him. She can’t help it. He’s usually so helpful, so on top of things, perfectly willing to lend her a hand (as long as he can grumble good-naturedly about it the entire way), but now he is acting like a child who can’t focus on the bigger picture. All of Haven is in danger—maybe America itself, from the way Vanessa keeps mentioning guns and fire and bombs, like an invasion from an old war movie—and Audrey’s trying to focus, trying to figure this out, trying to save everyone she can, and all Duke can do is pester her with his fears about a tattoo.

And Nathan isn’t here.

When Duke called, Audrey drove herself. She supposes she _could_ bring Nathan, could call him and have him meet her here and help her, but it’s bad enough she enlists his help when he’s her chauffeur, when they meet at a crime scene (her to investigate, him to write). Calling him for help just because…because…well, just because…that’s not quite so harmless or coincidental.

Regardless, he’s not here to soothe her with his silence and his presence, so she’s irritated and she’s impatient and she’s on edge (because sometimes, in Haven, she _doesn’t_ save everyone, and she cannot allow this to be one of those times), and calm as she tries to sound, Duke hears the edge to her voice.

His eyes narrow at her, and he draws himself up, all stiff, bristling edges, like a ship sailing along so placidly until there is a storm and suddenly its every plank, every edge, is streamlined, defensible, swift and sure and deadly. “I have helped you plenty of times, Officer-Agent Parker,” he bites out. “And you know better than most that in Haven, the future isn’t as safe as we’d like, so forgive me if I’m not exactly eager to find my life snuffed out on one of your investigations!”

“Okay,” Audrey says quickly (a hot flash of guilt surges through her like lightning). “You’re right, I’m sorry. It’s just that we need to focus on what we _do_ know right now, okay? If we can figure out who the present danger is, then we can deal with your strange tattooed guy.”

“Unless they’re the same person,” Duke points out darkly. “What if going after him is what ends up getting me killed?”

She reaches out and places her hand on his arm, holds on even when she feels the corded tension, the fizzling intensity, and waits until Duke meets her gaze. “I won’t let that happen,” she promises him. “All right? We’re going to make sure nothing bad happens.”

“Right.” Slowly, the effort evident in the play of muscles beneath Audrey’s hand, Duke forces himself to calmness. The grin he flashes her is stage-false, steel-bright, faux-calm. “So…how exactly do we find World War III?”

At least he’s focusing now, and that’s enough to help them figure out where the kids are showing an outdoor movie, and where Matt West is. Audrey doesn’t let herself think too much about Duke’s comment about the nearness of the future, or how this wouldn’t even be happening if she hadn’t saved Matt’s life (yet another example piling up on the already teetering stack of evidence that she can affect the Troubled in a way no one else can), or how maybe she _is_ taking Duke to his death.

Not that he’s complaining anymore. No, now he’s all intent on Vanessa and making sure she stays safe (as if sheer force of will can conform reality to his wishes, but if it could, Audrey’s sure she would have already ensured quite a few changes to both this town and the world).

It’s raining when they confront Matt. Her hands blister when her gun turns to scorched steel in her grip (and maybe it’s a good thing Nathan isn’t here, because he wouldn’t feel it go hot and melted, and he wouldn’t know to drop whatever he might be holding, like his camera or his pen and notepad). The stench of charred flesh sticks in the air like pollutants, as damning and searing as her single look at Vanessa’s body where Duke kneels. The look in Matt’s eyes scares her—it’s wild and frenzied and driven mad with power he can’t control, doesn’t understand, shouldn’t even _possess_.

She does the only thing she can think to do.

She talks.

And when the kid explodes, she hunches in on herself and tells herself there was no other way.

Some Troubled you can’t save.

Some Troubled are too far gone.

She tells herself, over and over again, that she had to do it, to protect Haven and Duke and anyone else who might have ended up like Vanessa, all burned and blistered (and dead), to make sure World War III didn’t happen without a single scorched gun being fired.

She tells herself she did the right thing. But even looking at Duke as he cradles a woman’s body in his arms (tears like cold, hard diamonds piercing his flesh), she cannot make herself believe it.

* * *

No matter her feelings on what she did, the case is closed. A kid with an explosive personality murdered the people he was angry with; maybe not intentionally, not at first, but Audrey can still see, every time she closes her eyes, that enraged look of crazed freedom transforming him into a monster.

She finishes up her paperwork and doesn’t let herself feel relief when it’s Dave and Vince who come to hound her about the story instead of Nathan (doesn’t let herself think of what he might say if, or when, he finds out what she did to stop the kid). She smirks at the brothers’ antics, and gives them minimal information and a confident assertion that the danger is over, and she feels a cold ball of ice settle in the pit of her stomach when Garland steps into her office with a bleak look in his eyes and an opened manila envelope in his hands.

Dave and Vince look between Garland and Audrey for a moment, then Dave shifts uncomfortably. “Uh…we’ll see you later, Audrey. Come on, Vince, let’s go.”

Audrey expects Vince to argue (just because when one says the sun sets in the west, the other insists it doesn’t), but instead he simply fixes a dark, intent look on Garland for so long that Audrey wonders if the police chief will combust beneath the force of it. Garland seems not to even notice it at first, but eventually, when he turns his gaze to Vince, he meets his eyes full-on. Audrey cannot read his expression, but instead of waves and wind and storms, he suddenly reminds her of a boulder, a rock that cannot be moved, a stone that is set and grounded and dug so deep into its foundation nothing short of a demolition blast will move it.

Vince does not break the stare, not until Dave tugs on his elbow. “Come on, Vince!” he hisses. “Not now! Not like this!”

And Vince allows himself to be dragged from the office.

Garland watches them go, long enough to let out a disdainful snort, before he turns back to Audrey.

“What was that about?” she starts to ask, but the words turn to dust in her mouth and choke her silent and stiff and scared when Garland flings the envelope down on her desk and she sees what’s inside.

They’re candid photos of a man. Walking across a street. Climbing into the driver’s seat of a small car. Holding a door open for a faceless stranger.

Unremarkable photos, except Audrey’s worked enough cases to know what these are.

A warning.

A threat.

A potential murder victim.

Worse, the man in the pictures has a familiar maze-like tattoo on his left arm.

“Who—” She has to stop, clear her throat of sand, and try again. “Who is he?”

“Stan recognized him as a clerk at the hardware store on Third Street. I need you to go talk to him. If necessary, we’ll pull him, get a security detail on him. But I want you to find out who’s doing this.”

Audrey meets Garland’s gaze. One cop to another (no clashing FBI and small town jurisdictions; no misconceptions about what kind of time-bomb they now have ticking away on an innocent man’s life). Knowledge and foreboding and determination, all of it there in his eyes like reflections of her own.

“I’ll find him,” she promises, and there is nothing but confidence in Garland’s answering nod.

* * *

“A tattoo?” Duke asks. “On his arm?”

She can read his panic even over the phone.

“Yes,” she replies, checking her rearview mirror as she makes a turn that’s not entirely legal. She may be used to Nathan driving her, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know where she’s going. Mostly. Well, it’s a small town anyway, and a street with the name of ‘Third Street’ can’t be that hard to find. “But someone’s targeting _him_. I’m going to talk to him—”

“I’m coming with you,” Duke interrupts her, and Audrey has to forcibly restrain herself from thumping her forehead into the steering wheel (and possibly causing a fatal accident seeing as how she’s just barely managing to keep on the safer side of over the speed limit as is). “Where are you?”

“You’re _not_ coming!” she insists. She would have said more, but she catches sight of a street sign proclaiming ‘Second Street,’ and she’s too busy following that trail to her intended destination.

“This guy could be the one that kills me!” She doesn’t even have to see him to know what expression he’s wearing—in fact, she knows without asking that he’s already leaping from his boat and heading toward his Land Rover. “I’m not going—”

Audrey slams her brakes in front of a hardware store with the creative name of ‘Haven Hardware Store,’ and throws it into park. “ _He’s_ the one in danger right now!” she hisses. “I only told you because you’re my friend, but you can’t use that to hamper an investigation.”

“Fine, fine,” Duke agrees. Far too easily. “I won’t hamper anything,” he continues, prompting a groan from Audrey. “I’ll just tag along. You know I’ve always been a help.”

“Not this—”

But the words slip away from her as she pushes open the store’s front door. Her phone drops from fingers already flying to unclip her gun from her belt.

The door to the hardware store hits resistance on the other side, but even the six inches it is open allows the nauseating scent of charred flesh to escape out into open air.

Audrey almost gags (flashes of Vanessa’s body, blood on lips, Duke’s mask scratched away to reveal pain and desolation beneath), but she clamps her lips shut and readies her gun. She puts her shoulder against the door.

It flies open on a scene that looks as if it came straight from the pages of a horror novel (and she’s an FBI agent and seen horrific things, but this is too over-the-top, as if it’s a mockery of real crime; a mockery, and a crime even worse because of that, because it is not taken seriously but made into a parody).

The inside of the store is black with ash and soot. The shelves are melted slag on the floor, all the tools turned into debris, the lumber to her right nothing more than gray flakes littering what’s left of the place. It stinks and smoke swirls from flames dwindling away into nothing. The soles of her feet are warmed even through her shoes, and she thinks she would smell their melted rubber if there weren’t so many other scents vying for attention.

In the center of the store, laid out as if just for her (it probably is, as evidenced by the photos sent so flagrantly to the station) is a body. Considering the damage to the rest of the place, she doesn’t think there should be enough left of the person to get a solid ID, but this is Haven and this isn’t regular arson, and the man from the pictures is still in the clothes he was wearing in several of those candid shots. He’s bones and fabric, gray and white and bits of black clothed in red and tan and hints of blue. There’s just one strip of flesh left clinging to his withered, tortured skeleton—on his left arm, just beneath his elbow.

As if outlined by black flames, the tattoo stands in clear relief.

* * *

Sheldon Stern. That was the man’s name. He’d inherited the hardware store from his father. He had no living relatives, but he had a girlfriend (Audrey’s selfishly grateful that Garland said he’d be the one to inform the poor woman). He had two dogs at home, never bothered anyone, liked shooting pool at the local bar, The Gun & Rose, on the weekends, and no one can (or _will_ ) say where he’d gotten the tattoo.

No one saw anybody suspicious entering the store. No one noticed anything unusual happening behind the untouched blinds hanging over the windows to block the setting sun. No one knows who would possibly want to harm Stern at all, let alone in such a terribly cruel, blatantly malicious way.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Duke says. He’s standing at her shoulder just behind her, the same place he’s been since he arrived moments after their phone conversation (and almost been shot by Audrey when he came through the door without warning). She’s glad he’s there. Glad he hasn’t moved. Glad he knows that if he made her look at him, or if he touched her, or if he did anything but stand there and let her feel the presence of someone alive and safe, she’d spontaneously combust.

“Isn’t it?” she asks blankly, when she remembers he said something. “I saw the pictures whoever did this sent us—I should have gotten here faster.”

“Look,” Duke says, and she hates the logical tone of his voice, hates that he is trying to rationalize away her failure (hates that she finds her every sense straining toward him, hoping he’ll be able to make the dark well of guilt go away). “Whoever did this was careful, all right? He wouldn’t have sent the pictures unless he was sure you couldn’t get here in time. He’s playing games, and when monsters like this play games, no one comes away a winner.”

“Well, I will,” Audrey says, her voice turned grim and hard.

“I know you will,” Duke says softly, and Audrey finally feels like she can breathe again.

* * *

They’re able to keep it out of the paper for two more days. It’s Audrey’s idea not to let anyone know, to keep it quiet. She tells Garland it’s to make sure the killer doesn’t think he can gain notoriety from his madness. She tells him there’s no need to spread panic when they don’t know when or if he’ll strike again. But in reality, she does it because she doesn’t want Nathan to know. She doesn’t want him to come pick her up and drive her to the decimated hardware store or the police station where they have two more envelopes of pictures (two more sets of photos of two more people, both of them sporting maze-like tattoos) or to the gift shop on the town line that now has only sprinklings of ash to mark its location or to the house on Seacrest Drive that’s hollowed out. She doesn’t want him to be anywhere near the three skeletons with their grisly appearance and their sickening smell and their little bits of ink-stained flesh.

She doesn’t want him in danger. Bad enough she’s let him come with her on other cases, but this is different. This killer isn’t just Troubled. He’s _maddened_. He’s raving with power and wild bloodlust and controlled sadism. He’s sick and twisted, and Audrey has chased other serial killers (has caught them and hid her shudders at their glares and woken from nightmares inspired by their methodical, insane confessions), but she does not want Nathan anywhere near it.

He’s been shot already, since she came to town. Shot and almost careened off a cliff and driven mad and burned and nearly killed by a shadow and sickened by poisoned food and almost mauled by a rag-stuffed moose. So many close calls—and those were all by accident.

She will not bring him into danger on purpose.

She wishes she could keep Duke away, too, but he stays. He brings her coffee and sits in her office with her and chivvies her out when he feels like she needs sleep. He’s with her when she examines the bodies and when she studies the photos over and over and over again (trying to find something, _needing_ to find anything). She thinks he’s there because of the tattoos (why _are_ they springing up all over the place? What do they mean? Why is the killer targeting them? How will Duke ever find his future murderer if so many people wear the complex sign?), until she realizes, late the second day, that he hasn’t said a thing about it except to reply to her own rhetorical questions.

He’s there for _her_. She’s grateful and touched and scared all at the same time.

“You don’t have to be here,” she tells him that night. “You can go get some sleep yourself if you need to.”

“And leave this exciting party all to you?” he asks with a flourish of his hand. It’s not funny (not with the grotesque crime scene photos and stalker pictures and homicide papers spread out all around them), but Audrey smiles anyway.

* * *

On the third day, she opens her motel door at the knock and finds Nathan on the other side. He looks nervous, almost anxious, and he shifts his weight from foot to foot.

She just stares for a minute. It’s only been a few days since she last saw him, but it seems like so long. It seems like an eternity has passed, as if she’s been trapped in an endless nightmare of death and suspense and guilt and terror and fading hope and now, suddenly, she’s woken up. Woken up to a blue-sky-gold-sun morning, everything back to normal.

“Nathan,” she says, and wonders why she’s surprised. She called him once, the first day, to tell him she was busy and he didn’t need to worry about her; since then, she hasn’t talked to him, hasn’t seen him, hasn’t been around if he’s ever tried to come visit her—she should have known he’d be worried about her.

“Parker,” he greets her. There is something ever so slightly off about his tone, something she can’t pin down right now, like this, surprised and barefoot and once again with something like a lump in her throat.

“I…I don’t have my shoes on yet,” she finally says, and waves him inside.

He hesitates behind her (she watches him from the corner of her eye as she searches for her shoes underneath the unmade bed), before finally stepping tentatively over the threshold and into the small room. Audrey has time to dig one shoe out from under the coverlet spilling onto the floor and locate the other one near the sink before Nathan even moves again, though he does so only to shove his hands into his pockets.

“You’re a little early, aren’t you?” she asks. She’s trying too hard to be casual (to pretend like she hasn’t been keeping him away from grisly murder scenes) and remembers too late that he can’t be early because he isn’t supposed to be here at all (isn’t supposed to be anywhere near the Trouble she’s mixed up in, but he can’t know that because she hasn’t told him).

“I…I didn’t come here for that,” he says, then hurriedly adds, “Though, of course, I’d be happy to drive you to the station. I mean, if you want. Like usual. Sorry—that I haven’t been coming the past couple days. I thought maybe I’d been replaced.”

Audrey has to stop (both shoes hanging in her hands) and gape at him. He’s babbling. The imperturbable, monosyllabic journalist is babbling right in front of her and the world hasn’t stopped, the sky hasn’t fallen down, and Hell most definitely hasn’t frozen over.

“It’s fine,” she says vaguely. “I told you not to worry about it.”

A hint of red stains his sharp cheekbones as he looks away, out the wide window. “Parker,” he says, and then stops. As if that is all he came to say. All that needs to be said. As if it is definitive statement and coherent explanation all in one, when in fact, it’s neither.

“It’s okay, Nathan,” she says softly. Gently. She takes a few steps toward him, but stops with a foot of distance between them, not wanting to crowd him. She wants to reassure him, wants to ease the troubled line creasing his brow, but she also wants to keep this moment alive. Wants to keep this dream going as long as she can before she has to dive back into her nightmare. “What is it?”

Nathan swallows, and she can see the turmoil on his face. His sea-blue eyes are fixed on the window, his shoulders tense, his hands hidden away. “About the night at the station a while back,” he begins awkwardly.

And no matter how long this case feels like it’s been dragging on, Audrey is instantly thrust back into that moment. The dark of the station. The closeness of the echoing confines. The smell of gunpowder in the air dissipating beneath his own unique scent. Her name spilled from his lips like secrets from a private journal. His arms closing around her. His heart beating beneath her cheek.

And the terrified look on his face as he stumbled away from her.

Suddenly, she can’t breathe. She’s looking up at his profile, less than a foot between them now, and she can’t move, because she’s afraid of what he’s going to say. She’s not afraid of this serial killer (not terrified, just coldly resolute and stiffly determined to find him and stop him no matter what it takes) or of the dangers she runs into as an FBI agent. But she’s scared of what Nathan will say. Scared that he will say they shouldn’t have hugged. Scared that he won’t want to be her friend anymore (that she pushed too far too fast, demanded too much of him). Or scared that he will want something more when she has nothing more to give him, not right now, not with Lucy and vanished memories from small boys and their babysitters and Troubled and serial killers with a penchant for fire and her own past on her back like a burden weighing her down.

But she can’t stop him from speaking either. Because that single hug is engraved in her memory like a clear, shining moment in between all the days of darkness. Because he’s come even when he’s clearly scared himself (and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him scared before, not really; except for that moment in the station, staring at _her_ ), and he’s trying so hard to find the words.

So. “What is it?” she asks again.

He takes a deep breath, as if he’s resigned himself to his fate. Then he turns to face her. He is braced for something, expecting the worst (as he so often does). He takes his hands out of his pockets, and the movement draws Audrey’s attention. She looks down at his hands, watches them clench and unclench into fists. His shirt sleeves are rolled up to his elbows; his skin is tanned and weathered, muscular and…and…

And there is a black tattoo on his left arm. Beneath his elbow.

A maze-like tattoo with four compass points and a tiny man standing at each point.

Audrey’s heart stutters to a halt in her chest for a long moment before restarting again at such a ridiculous pace she feels as if she will faint.

“Parker, when you touched—”

“Where did you get that?” she demands, scarcely aware that he’s speaking at all. Her eyes are fixed on the tattoo to the exclusion of all else. “ _When_ did you get that? What’s it for? Why do you have it?”

She can sense his confusion, but she can’t look away from the ink on his arm to reassure him, to meet his gaze and see what he’s thinking. Instead, she takes a single large step forward and grabs hold of his left arm. His muscles go as solid as iron beneath her touch and he stops breathing completely, which startles Audrey enough that she looks up at him.

He’s staring at her. His jaw is locked so tightly she can see a muscle ticking away at the corner like a reflection of her own too-fast pulse. He does not jerk away from her hand, but he is frozen still, and Audrey is suddenly guilty. Hastily, she drops his arm and steps back.

But she cannot drop the subject. Terror is sluicing through her veins like black oil through salt water, contaminating and polluting and destroying (because what if she gets photos of _him_ in a yellow manila envelope, delivered anonymously to the police station by a clueless courier?).

“The tattoo,” she clarifies. “Where did you get it?”

He narrows his eyes at her. Once more, his emotions are all solidly tucked away inside, his stiff exterior belied only by the way he holds his left arm ever so gingerly against his side. As if she bruised it, broke it, pierced his flesh and cracked his bone. “Why?” he asks.

And for all that she has tried to protect him, suddenly he is right smack-dab in the middle of it all.


	5. Chapter 5

“I know it’s chancy,” Audrey says, and thinks that she will never forgive Garland for this. She hates the police chief (not the father, because a _father_ would never ask this, not of his own son) with a passion that shocks her. Hates him for deciding on this course of action, on talking her into it. On making her be the one to ask it of Nathan (hates herself for volunteering to be the one to tell him, yes, but mostly just Garland, for not insisting on doing it himself). “But this is really our best bet. Our _only_ bet, right now. We know he’s targeting people with that maze tattoo, for whatever reason, and if we can control who his next target is, we can draw him out.”

Nathan gives a slow nod, his eyes fixed on the ocean below them, his elbows planted on his knees. They’re sitting on the park bench overlooking the beach, just a block or so from the station. They’ve come here several times before, to eat lunch or talk about whatever story he’s writing, or just to sit in companionable silence while they wait for their coffees to cool enough to drink. (Audrey wishes she hadn’t brought them here to make her request of him; she wishes she hadn’t forever tainted the location with her fear and guilt and desperation.)

“You know,” he says, conversationally (pretending numbness inside, like he always does, hiding away his reaction to her words, whatever they might be), “I tried being a cop.”

“You did?” Her brows rise of their own accord. She has a good imagination—good enough to cause a stir and more than at the Bureau—but she can’t quite picture the quiet, sweet man who brings her coffee and stares at her with such a perplexed look when she steals sips to test the temperature for him with a badge on his belt and a gun at his hip. Or maybe she just doesn’t _want_ to (doesn’t want to think about Nathan striding unflinchingly into a hail of bullets and a storm of fire while scars build a map of carelessness and pain across his skin).

“It was a long time ago.” His shrug is minimal. “But yeah, I thought about it. Got my major in criminal justice, went to the academy, everything.”

Audrey stares at him, waits for elaboration she knows will not come. Anyone else would let him go, would try to convince him to play the part Garland wants him to play—but she doesn’t want him anywhere near this serial killer, certainly not as a potential victim, and it’s rare that he tells her anything personal. So she nudges his shoulder with her own and asks, “What happened?”

He turns to meet her eyes. Suddenly, sharply, as if startled into it. But then there is a hint of a masking smile on his lips. “Just didn’t suit. So…what do I do?”

As easily as that, Nathan has a bullseye painted on his chest, and Audrey painted it there herself.

* * *

It’s Duke, surprisingly enough, who comes storming into the station the next day, a copy of the day’s paper clenched in a tight hand. He waves it in her face and slams it down on her desk. She doesn’t need to look down to see the black and white photo of Nathan holding a notepad, the distinctive, damning tattoo on his arm clear for all to see.

“What is this?” Duke grates. “Why would they put that picture in there? Why haven’t you stopped it?”

Audrey stares at the paper. Runs her hands along its grainy texture (hopes that this is the only time she will see a picture of Nathan on her desk like this). “It’s an article about the reporters of the _Haven Herald_ ,” she says. It has never been such an effort to make her voice even.

Duke is silent, a silence brimming with horrified realization and terrible fury. She can’t look up, can’t meet his eyes, but she can feel his rage. “What are you doing?” he whispers, his voice so hoarse she wonders if he’s afflicted by his own lump-that-is-not-a-lump. “Does Chief Wuornos know about this?”

And finally Audrey can look up, can meet his gaze, her own horror and panic and desperation leaking through. “It was his idea,” she says, and there is anger and accusation in her voice too.

“He can’t do this!” Duke exclaims. His hands are gesticulating wildly, great flourishing motions that decry his denial with every line of his body. “Do you have any idea what it’ll do to Nathan to have his picture in the paper—to remind everyone in Haven about him just when they’ve almost forgotten? Is the tattoo even real? Did he volunteer? Why would anyone be stupid enough to listen to him?”

“I got the tattoo just before getting the job at the _Herald_.” Nathan’s voice cuts through Duke’s outrage and Audrey’s silence as easily as if it’s a knife through charred flesh. He stands just outside her office, her Black Bears mug in his hand, his eyes narrowed as he glares at Duke. “And I didn’t volunteer, but only because I didn’t know about any of this.”

“Audrey.” Duke turns to her, appealing directly to her (she wishes more than anything she could give him what he wants). “Please. You know how dangerous this is. You know—”

“I can do this,” Nathan interrupts again. And Audrey doesn’t want him to (she wants him far away, eating pancakes with too much syrup and writing harmless stories and pretending he doesn’t hear the Teagues arguing mere feet away from his orderly desk), but there is something in his voice, a broken, almost-desperate note to it. As if he doesn’t believe his own words…but _wants_ to. As if he _needs_ to believe them because he’s spent too long listening to everyone say he isn’t worth anything and can accomplish nothing worthwhile and is less than a man.

So she pastes a smile on her lips and says, “Right. You can, Nathan. And you will. Now that our killer hopefully knows you have the tattoo, we just have to wait to see if he takes the bait.”

Duke’s eyes are accusing (mute reproach that sears its way through her and leaves a deep, dark bruise like its own tattoo on her heart). But Nathan’s are grateful (she only hopes the memory of this doesn’t come back to haunt her in the days to come).

* * *

The plan is for Nathan to always be with a cop. Always. He’s never allowed to be alone, never allowed to go anywhere without checking in, never allowed to do anything but what’s been decided he can do and still remain within a protective perimeter. He doesn’t object (hasn’t objected to anything since she asked this of him, or maybe of anything she’s _ever_ asked of him, she can’t quite recall), just nods to everything his father outlines and sits in the station pretending to write stories he no longer has the time or place to research. Eventually Audrey clears off the extra desk in her office and lets him have access to a computer, just so he can do _something_ besides sit on the couch and stare down at a blank notepad.

Stan and a few others (she can’t remember their names, though Nathan seems to know them all) volunteered to stay with Nathan when he went home. Not that Nathan knows that; she just grabbed him when it was time to leave the station that first day and told him she was staying with him. Stan and the others have homes, families, lives to go back to. But Audrey has only a motel room and a box of six cupcakes (probably stale by now), and Nathan is _part_ of her life, and curiosity has always been a besetting sin of hers (and this is her fault, because she’s the one who asked him, and she will not let anything happen to him while she is sleeping halfway across town).

It’s easy, staying with Nathan. He drives her, just like he always does, only instead of heading toward the beach, he heads toward the bluffs. His house is small, modest, and doesn’t have a guest bedroom, but he throws a few blankets on the couch and then, without saying a word, stakes his claim on it, leaving her his bed with fresh sheets that still smell, faintly, of him.

He’s quiet, and he lets her talk as much as she wants, gives what’s for him a full-on smile when she’s particularly sarcastic, and cracks more than a few dry jokes of his own when she’s least expecting them (as if he isn’t scared at all; as if he trusts her to protect him). He makes her feel comfortable, and he makes her laugh, and he acts as if she’s there for a sleepover just because the motel’s getting sprayed for bugs or had flood damage or kicked her out for leaving too many empty bakery boxes laying around (acts as if he doesn’t notice when she stares at him sometimes and can see only the images of the latest victims). He lets her pick the movies in the evenings (old science-fiction movies and new science-fiction shows, and he rolls his eyes, but she notices he’ll correct her, sometimes, if she uses the wrong term for phasers or Stargates or jump-drives), and even though he doesn’t touch her, he sits close enough for his warmth to ease its way inside her and thaw out frozen seeds rooted along her spinal cord.

In the mornings, he’s always awake before she is (she wonders if he always sleeps so little or if he’s uncomfortable with someone intruding on his space; he’s very private, after all, and so alone, and so used to it), and she wakes to the smell of coffee and pancakes. She teases him about it, having pancakes for breakfast every day, but he only shrugs and smiles shyly and pours more syrup over his plate.

It’s easy, living with Nathan. Easy, and that scares her. _Terrifies_ her. Because he’s her friend and losing him would kill her, but now he’s just a little bit more than a friend (looks at her, sometimes, with a little bit _extra_ in his eyes, and she wonders if, sometimes, she has that little bit _extra_ in her eyes like a reflection, gleaming back at him between smirks and glares and companionable silence) and losing him will not kill her, it will _destroy_ her.

She’s scared, and she tries so hard to figure this out, to _fix_ this, before he’s in danger, but she can’t find anything at all, and Duke keeps looking at her from across the chasm-like distance now between them with eyes black as chips of obsidian, cold and judgmental and condemning, and Audrey feels like she’s drowning—drowning beneath this case, this endless nightmare, and surfacing for quick, life-sustaining sips of air when it’s just her and Nathan, in her office or at his house, laughing and teasing and making fun of cheesy special effects.

She’s drowning, and she doesn’t know what to do, and for the first time, she wishes she had never come to Haven.

* * *

It takes three days (three more deaths, arranged like gifts for her to find, the photos delivered through clueless deliverymen thirty minutes before the estimated time of death) before it finally happens.

Garland actually doesn’t bring the envelope to her. She’s walking past his office and hears something fall, and she looks inside and sees him, gray-faced and dull-eyed, staring down at an envelope just barely opened on the desk.

Her heart stops, stumbles, falls, hits her stomach with a crash that sends off a reverberating echo throughout her entire body, every molecule shaken and tossed about like chaos unleashed, a storm that will fling her to tiny bits, scattered across galaxies.

“Chief?” Her voice is dusty and dry and unaided by her currently out-of-commission lungs.

“Nathan,” he says, and nothing more. But she doesn’t need anything more.

Her two mugs of coffee crash to the floor and shatter (the scent of bitter coffee, black and unsweetened for them both; lukewarm and not really steaming so he can sip it without worrying about a blistered tongue) and she is running. It usually takes her about ten steps to reach her office from Garland’s, but she reaches it in three and sends the blinds careening into one another as she skids inside.

Nathan looks up from the desk she’s given him. “Where’s the coffee?” he asks.

She doesn’t answer (she doesn’t think she _can_ yet), just sags against the doorway and leans her head down and tries not to black out.

“Parker?” He comes over to her, lets his hands hover between them for a moment as if he’ll reach out and steady her, then drops them back to his sides. “You okay?”

More than anything, she wants to hide this from him. She doesn’t want to see him afraid and hunted. She doesn’t want to be responsible for him dying.

But he’s so close to her, and his eyes are concerned, and she can’t lie to him.

“Pictures,” she manages to say. “We just got pictures of you.”

And Audrey thinks her heart will seize up again (and it definitely _is_ a lump in her throat this time), because Nathan doesn’t look scared. He looks defiant.

“Well, good,” he says, as if it’s obvious. As if he’s only saying it so that she doesn’t have to. “Finally we can stop this guy.”

“Yeah,” Audrey says after a moment. She cannot look away from him, cannot pretend that her heart rate is anywhere near a healthy level. “We will.”

His nod is gratitude and determination both together. She would be impressed (would tell him so), but all she can hear is a clock ticking down his final moments.

* * *

Thirty minutes pass, and there is no attack. No smoke, no fire, no burning. No murder.

Nathan sits in her office, pinned down by her hyper-vigilant stare and the cops surrounding the office and Garland pacing back and forth in front of the door (and she knows this isn’t what they need to do, isn’t what will draw the killer out, but she doesn’t _care_ ), and shows no sign of worry, except for maybe his occasional coughs and the way he reaches out a hand and smooths it down his tattoo (why _does_ he have the thing?).

Another thirty minutes and still there is nothing. Audrey’s nerves are about to start a revolution, and her muscles are jittery from being tensed and confined all day.

Another thirty minutes, and Duke comes in, sees them all arrayed before him, and for an instant, Audrey is certain she sees terror flash across his face. But when he catches sight of Nathan, he just nods and eases his way through the cops who don’t make way for him and flops himself down on the couch, a silent sentinel, loose and at ease and ready to kill at an instant’s notice.

The whole day passes in thirty minute segments of tension and desperate relief.

No other envelope arrives.

No fires are sighted.

Nobody dies.

Nathan hates it. She can see him chafing, can feel his impatience growing. “I don’t understand,” he murmurs to her, leaning over her desk as if looking at whatever’s on her computer screen (she doesn’t even remember what it is, can’t take her eyes off Nathan long enough to remind herself). “I thought the envelope always came just before the killer struck.”

“It has,” she says, then holds her breath to keep from berating him about _wanting_ a cold-blooded killer to attack him. _She_ asked this of him, after all. She’s the one who put him in this situation. (And they do need to find this killer, stop him before he leaves an even longer trail of bodies, but not if the price is Nathan, because that price is far, far too high.)

“Then where is he?” Nathan asks.

“I don’t know,” she replies.

And they go back to waiting.

* * *

It’s late when she and Garland force themselves to let Nathan out of the station. Audrey stays at his side, her hand on her gun, her eyes never staying in one place for long, and they are shadowed to his house by two squad cars. Nathan moves restlessly from the kitchen to the living room and back before telling her good night and settling down on the couch. She wonders if he really thinks that she will leave him alone and go back farther into the house and shut herself up in his bedroom so he can be murdered in his sleep. Without saying a word, she settles herself on a kitchen chair where she can watch him, and she lays out her gun on the counter beside her, and she does not move (except to periodically rise and hover a hand over Nathan’s skin to make sure it is not burning from the inside out) until the sun casts shimmering nets into the house through the front windows.

She’s pretty sure Nathan doesn’t sleep (pretty sure he could feel her gaze on him all night), but he gets up as if this is just a normal morning like any other. For the first time, she watches him start the coffee and arrange the ingredients for pancakes, and she is made lightheaded from the smell of cooking batter, of percolating coffee, of _Nathan_ , so dizzy with relief that he’s survived an entire day, that it takes her until he is setting a full plate in front of her to realize that his shoulders are stooped and rounded and his eyes are downcast.

“I’m sorry,” he offers when he sits across from her with his own plate. There is no clearer sign that something is wrong than the fact that he only plays with his syrup-coated breakfast.

“Sorry,” she repeats. “For what?”

He swallows, hard and thick so that if he could feel, he might have choked. “I thought I could help,” he says, so quietly she almost cannot hear him over the contented hum of the coffee pot. “I thought…”

“You do help, Nathan,” she says when it becomes clear he will say nothing more. She is used to being surprised by the journalist, but she still finds herself gaping at him. Her hand makes an automatic move toward his before she stops it and returns it to the slick smoothness of her gun. “We don’t know that the killer still won’t come after you, but even if he doesn’t, you help me all the time, Nathan.”

He smiles, but it is a fake smile (and he smiles so rarely even when they’re real that Audrey can’t help but wonder why he feels he needs to even make the effort for a fake one). “Right.”

But his shoulders remain rounded, and Audrey thinks there should be something she can say. Maybe there is, but she cannot think of it past her own selfish gratitude that they apparently scared away their serial killer.

They finish their breakfast (Nathan throws away most of his pancakes, which is surely a first), and he ducks into the bathroom to get ready (Audrey hovers outside, listening for anything, looking for steam to rise from the crack between the door and the floor because Nathan cannot feel and how will he know if his blood begins to boil and his heart begins to roast and his skin peels away from his bones?), and she pretends she changed while he was in the bathroom even though it’s obvious she hasn’t, and he drives her to the station.

They wait all day. For something to happen. For any hint of what to expect. For the killer to attack. For another delivery.

Garland paces a track in the floor in front of her office. Duke pretends to nap on the couch. Stan and a few others make excuses to hang around near wherever Nathan goes. Nathan himself goes grimly silent, his eyes tight, his mouth pinched. Audrey tries not to smile overtly or show anything other than the professionalism she assumes they all expect from her.

At night, they go back to his house, and Nathan cajoles Audrey into sitting on the couch with him instead of in the kitchen (easier to do because she hasn’t slept in two days and she’s exhausted, but she did catch a few hours in the office earlier, so she’s alert enough not to let her gun get out of easy reach). He turns the TV on to an old episode of _Babylon 5_ , and Audrey lets herself think that maybe she didn’t ruin everything by making Nathan into a target.

* * *

In the morning, she finds her head leaning on Nathan’s shoulder, and the journalist asleep with his head lolled back against the couch. It is warm and comfortable, and so domestic she thinks it should make her anxious; instead, it only makes her wistful. Makes her wish she could freeze this moment in place and keep it, like a photograph tucked in her pocket, to pull out and relive on bad days.

Regretfully, she stirs (checks that her hand is still on her gun), then looks up when Nathan turns his head toward her. He is caught between waking and sleeping, his eyes heavy-lidded. When he sees her, his mouth curls up in an immediate smile. Audrey pretends her heart doesn’t do some kind of funny, odd half-step inside of her, as if it suddenly turns shy and shuffles around in search of a place to hide and peek out from behind only bashfully.

“Parker,” Nathan says, and Audrey’s lips curve up into her own smile.

“Hey,” she replies (not exactly a witty comment, but she’s running on only a handful of hours of sleep in three days).

And that’s when the killer finally strikes.

* * *

Looking back on it later, she thinks that she would have been happy if he’d never come after Nathan. If she’d been allowed to remain Nathan’s shadow for an indefinite period of time, golden pancake-and-sarcasm days slipping through her fingers too quickly for her to savor as much as they deserved. (If she’d never had to feel that sudden violent surge of panicked terror that hit her like a sledgehammer the moment Nathan’s t-shirt went up in sudden flames and he didn’t even seem to notice, just looked up at the man standing in the hallway leading to the bedroom then tackled him to the floor).

When the attack came, it was so quick and abrupt, days of waiting on edge all condensed into these few moments when she felt as if she were completely unprepared. Noise and heat and danger shattering the morning stillness of Nathan’s eyes fixed on her to the exclusion of all else (the absence of that weight always on his shoulders, those shadows in the back of his eyes). Bright lights and stark heat wafting like the stench of death that only just barely missed her when Nathan pushed her down and over, and Nathan at her shoulder while she tried to talk the man into a standstill.

“It’s all their fault!” Christopher West spits at her, the madness in his eyes familiar and terrifying (the memory of rain and flames, of insanity sparking monstrosities in a boy with the same jaw and eyes as this older man, of a gun seared from her blistered hands and Duke weeping behind her over Vanessa’s body). “ _They_ brought this down on us, just like the Rev said. And there’s only one way to end it all!”

It took her moments to talk him into that pause, and only seconds for that truce to go up in flames sent Nathan’s way before he tackles the man.

Audrey screams (she thinks she screams Nathan’s name, but maybe it is only a formless, shapeless noise demanding that reality not weave her fears into its fabric). The killer is shouting, thrashing, and Nathan’s shirt is falling away from him and there are red, angry blisters on his shoulders.

“This is your doing!” the monster rages, throwing Nathan off of him. “You failed us! We needed you and you turned your back on us, and now my son is dead!”

For two days, Audrey has kept one hand constantly on her gun. It is slicked with her sweat and moistened with the steam filling the room, but her palm curves along the butt of it so easily it is almost dreamlike. Nathan’s on the floor (trying to get up, the stupid man, why won’t he just stay down?), the killer (a father, maddened and enraged, but Audrey doesn’t _care_ because how dare he, _how dare he_?) advancing on him, spitcurls of red-orange fire twining along his arms (one of those arms emblazoned with a too-familiar tattoo) and lighting his blond hair in a luminescent, demonic halo, and Audrey does not think it has ever been easier to pull a trigger.

For hours afterward, she cannot stop shaking, but in that moment, her hand is rock-steady, diamond-cold, wholly resolute. She regretted the boy exploding in a bright, sickening flash of destruction and waste, but she does not regret (not for a second, not an iota) the heavy sound of the man’s body falling to Nathan’s wood floor, the complete cessation of the tongues of flame and ash on his own body, on Nathan’s floor, on the charred remnants of his shirt ground beneath their feet.

The entire thing took less than ten minutes (her nightmares, in contrast, will last for months, for years). Days and days ( _eternities_ ) have been given over to looking for this raving lunatic, and now it is over, and Audrey trembles and she feels her stomach all hollowed out and her heart battered to numb submission and her thoughts whirling from place to place, but at least it is over. And over all, it went well (she tells herself that over and over again, when the paramedics just _keep_ working on Nathan without letting her get close, for so long she thinks she will scream and grab them and yank them away from him). It went well, and it could have gone worse, could have been Nathan’s charred bones found in the ruins of the _Herald_ building or Audrey herself who got hurt standing against fire and smoke instead of being shoved out of the way by Nathan’s quick thinking and strong hands.

Could have been either of them dead, instead of the perp, a sheet over his body to hide the bullet hole in his forehead.

“So,” Audrey says when they finally, _finally_ , let her see Nathan (sitting on his soot-stained couch, reeking of smoke and salt), his sweat pants tattered and torn and frayed but his chest and back and shoulders covered in stark white bandages (and Audrey thinks she will be sick at the overwhelming sight of them). Her voice wavers, but not much, thanks to her white-knuckled grip on her elbows, her arms wrapped around herself. “I don’t know why you didn’t end up becoming a cop, Nathan, because this…” She pauses (to swallow the definite lump in her throat) to throw out a hand indicating the living room (the cozy scene of the last few days transformed into a cold, harsh crime scene), the cops and officers picking their way around shattered lamps and fallen pillows and the body being carted away. “Well, from where I’m standing, I’d say _this_ suits you fine.”

He makes his customary half-nod, neither confirming nor denying, just acknowledging. “Trust me, Parker,” he says, and Audrey frowns at the defeated note in his voice, “me being a cop isn’t a good idea.”

“Being a detective then,” she says, and manages to dredge up a smile, willing him to smile back at her (prove to the niggling voices of doubt within that he’s okay and does not hate her for using him as bait).

“Mm,” he hums noncommittally. Audrey suddenly wants to shake him (wants to hug him and not let go for hours, for days, until she is certain he is safe and whole and unharmed), or better yet, shake the whole town, until they all realize how special and important and so _not_ broken he is.

“Come on, Nathan,” she says instead, “you saved my life and helped apprehend a serial killer—that’s a good day’s work. That’s helping, just like you wanted.”

“It’s not that.” Nathan sighs. He finally meets her gaze; Audrey is struck speechless by the maelstrom of emotion contained within him, violently roiling in storm-blue eyes. He looks so still, so worn down, but his eyes betray whole wars being waged within (she thinks, suddenly, that this is what it is like all the time; that if she were to peek into the hidden interior of his skull, she would see the scars of constant conflict, guerilla warfare playing out, unending, just beneath his stoic mask).

“Then what is it?” she asks, and maybe she should let this go, just smile and say good job and pretend it is not easy and right being with him and just walk away until she tells him ‘good morning, no comment’ at the next crime scene. But he’s so much more than just a reporter, more than a cardboard character with an elusive name she can never quite remember. He’s _Nathan_ , and he’s her friend and she thinks she is _his_ friend too, so she pushes because she wants to know and because he has no one else to tell.

Nathan’s shoulders slump (just a hair, a fraction, but reading Nathan is all about looking for the miniscule and hearing what lies between the lines of what he _does_ say), but he angles his body toward her even though his eyes are locked straight ahead of him, to the TV now powerless and gray. “The chief isn’t my real dad,” he admits softly, oblivious to the background hubbub of the emergency workers. “He adopted me, married my mom, took me in. But before that, I had a monster as a father. He…he couldn’t feel either and that made him…interested…in just how much he could make _other_ people feel.”

A breeze slides through the open door, the cracked windows, twines between Audrey and Nathan, a breath of fresh air that is slayed and tainted by the dark pain oozing out of these admissions like pus from a wound, hidden beneath bandages but now exposed to open air.

“He went after my mom once,” Nathan continues, “like usual. Only this time, I got in the way. I didn’t think much of it. Couldn’t feel it. Which only made him madder, made him try harder. I thought I was just used to it. But when everyone saw the blood and the bone sticking out of my arm, it was finally enough to get us away from him for good. Anyway,” he shrugs, his voice still a quiet monotone, as if it doesn’t affect him even though she knows him, knows how much he feels beneath his numb, untouched façade. “I went to the academy, but…” He shrugs his bandaged shoulders again (she wants to reach out and wrap her arms around them, wants to calm this instinctual flinch away from pain he can’t admit to). “Apparently, due to repressed childhood memories and an extreme reaction to violence, it wasn’t a good fit.”

“Nathan,” Audrey breathes, as horrified as if she has just realized he has a gaping wound bleeding him dry from the inside out (and that’s what she _is_ seeing, isn’t it?), but he flinches away from the sound of it, withdrawing before she can even gather the words to tell him how sorry she is, how much she wishes she (or her mother, because Lucy was supposed to _help_ the Troubled, and Nathan was just a little boy, and he’d _needed_ her) had been there to stand between him and his monster of a father (no, not a father, just a monster, period), to gather him into her arms and reassure him that it was okay, he was safe, _he_ wasn’t a monster, he was precious and so worthy of saving.

But she can’t say all of that. Can’t even look Nathan in the eye while she thinks it, because he’d close up behind his impenetrable walls and she doesn’t want him to avoid her the way he does everyone else.

So instead she sits by him (eases closer until their shoulders are brushing against each other, and she thinks she feels a fraction of his tension drain from him), and she looks at the TV too, as if they are still watching a harmless show, still safe in their cozy little pocket of this crazy town. “One of my foster fathers was awful,” she confides (gently, slowly, as if he, or even she, is so fragile the wrong word might fracture the perilous peace teetering between them, evidenced by their trembling hands and wavering voices). “But only under the cover of dark. I found out he was sneaking into one of the other girl’s rooms.”

She’s not absolutely sure, but she thinks Nathan presses his shoulder just a bit tighter against hers. His heat, diluted by bandages, scorches away the pain of this memory. “What did you do?” he asks, and she almost hugs him for knowing her so well and accepting without question that she would act.

“I waited for him with a pair of scissors.” She takes a deep breath. “He thought he tripped in the dark—I knew I’d aimed for his neck. And he never went near her again.” She reflects his shrug back on him, finding a sort of all-encompassing meaning in the gesture, as if it blankets anything and everything she wants to convey without actually trusting the words to her feeble voice and frail words. “That’s when I knew I wanted to be a cop.”

He gives another of his little nods. “How old were you?”

“Does it matter?” she asks, puzzled.

“Young, then,” he says, as if she answered. “And you knew right away.”

“It seemed like something I could do.” She looks away from the featureless television to study him at the note of resignation in his voice, the hint of defeat once more evident in the set of his shoulders. “Something that would matter. Something that would make a difference.”

Finally, so abruptly she has to catch her breath, Nathan swings his head and locks his gaze with hers. “It does matter,” he tells her, as if it is the truest statement ever spoken, more apparent than the sky being blue or everything that goes up coming down again (and this _is_ Haven, so…). “It matters a lot.”

Maybe she should say thank you (or tell him he matters too, quiet the burning uncertainty in his eyes), but all she can do is give him a soft smile and hope he can read her as well as (she thinks) she reads him. Hopes he can see past her exhaustion and guilt and residual terror and lingering panic and faint relief to see her gratefulness.

She has no time to make certain, though. Duke sweeps in through the door, past the police officers on scene, and Garland stumps in behind him, and Nathan fades once more into his aloof shell. The moment vanishes, submerged in blatant exasperation and gruff concern and demands for information.

Audrey stands amidst the rubble of Nathan’s living room and feels as if she has just missed something undeniably precious. As if a very important moment has slipped away from her, never to be reclaimed. As if she has just lost something she didn’t even know she wants.


	6. Chapter 6

“It’s just poker,” Duke cajoles her. It’s the first time he’s tried to spend time with her since storming into her office with a newspaper in his hand, and she’s been trying to figure out a way to see the possible suspects in the poker games in action anyway, so she doesn’t think twice before agreeing.

A day later, the afternoon sunshine abrasive and stinging against her tired eyes, the sway of Duke’s ship pronounced enough to make her sick, and her gut churning a slow, tired melee inside her, she thinks she made a mistake. She should have tried to repair her friendship with Duke in a more familiar, less isolated setting. She should have told Garland or Nathan or _someone_ that she was investigating these guys. And she most definitely should have sent in the reports she promised to send so that Agent Howard didn’t have to come chasing after her himself (didn’t have to confront her and force her to put into words all the weirdness and strangeness and _alienness_ she’s been ignoring and living with and pretending is just fine because a little, tamped down part of herself actually _likes_ the weirdness),

But hindsight’s 20/20, and Audrey might be good at her job, but she’s no psychic, able to tell the future and warn herself of what’s coming (fix every problem even before it occurs).

So she spends the night on Duke’s boat, and she finds herself locked into the stateroom with Howard (who seems cavalier about the fact that they’re abducted and stranded in deep ocean with no one coming for them and no way to get back to shore), and as amusing as making Duke strip and jump at her command is, it’s not exactly the outing she had planned for them.

“Sorry about this,” Duke’s hand waves at the dock around them (the cops milling about, the squad car leaving with the two arrested people, the _Cape Rouge_ listing sullenly to the side; Agent Howard standing and watching her from afar, an unreadable expression covering his oblique features).

“You mean this doesn’t usually happen on poker nights?” Audrey asks with a straight face, and has to smile when Duke lets out a burst of laughter.

“No.” He shakes his head. “Not exactly. But still, I knew when I invited you that you’d be the life of the party.” There’s something almost tender in the way he says it, something affectionate and fond and wry, and she knows that he has forgiven her for her part in the whole using-Nathan-as-bait fiasco.

“That’s me,” she says, playing her part as well as he does his (hiding that she’s exhausted and confused and wants nothing more than to walk away from here without having to finish her conversation with Howard). “I don’t want you getting complacent.”

Duke studies her a moment, and though she’s wearing a mask that’s well-suited to her (adhering to her bones and skin by virtue of long practice and easy habit), she feels as if he’s looking straight through it (and she wonders what he sees there, in the dark shadows of her own self, that even she doesn’t know and cannot bring herself to look to). “Good thing,” he finally says softly. “If not for you, things would have gotten a lot dicier. I mean, I can take care of myself, but I’d hate to think of anything happening to my boat.”

“I think you’ll be able to fix her,” Audrey murmurs, and Duke’s smile is full of blatant double-meanings and veiled reassurance.

“I’m sure of it,” he says.

So few words, but there’s something about the way he says them, the way he looks at her (the way he believes in her so steadfastly) that gives Audrey the courage to head in Agent Howard’s direction. It gives her the resolution to stand in front of him (her boss, her mentor, her last tie to a world outside Haven; the world that dwindles and fades and seems to grow less important with each passing day) and look him in the eye.

He’s saying something about her needing to finish her report, and she nods (because she hates saying these things out loud and realizing how crazy she sounds, but she does know he’s been lenient with her in letting her stay so long and he deserves _something_ ). But then, vaguely, almost too late, she realizes that he’s saying it’s time for her to leave Haven.

Leave Haven.

It’s like a lightning bolt to her system, electricity pouring through her, jangling in frantic, spiked arcs through her limbs. It wakes her and revitalizes her and makes her feel as if she is afire.

Leave Haven.

Leave the Troubled that need her and have no one else in this town willing to look at them and admit they are there and try to help them? Leave Rosemary’s and her perfectly moist pastries? Leave Garland and the workload he pretends doesn’t bother him but that makes his shoulders rounder and the lines around his mouth and eyes deeper and the emotional distance between himself and his son ever wider? Leave Duke with his smiles and his perfectly timed encouragement and his harmless flirting and the somberness that slips out at both the best and worst of times? Leave Nathan, now, when she knows exactly how alone and set apart he is? Knows exactly how wonderful and selfless and brave he is?

“I can’t,” she says aloud. She’s interrupted him (her superior, her almost-friend, the weight on her ankle trying to drag her down when there’s still so much left for her to do), and she doesn’t care at all. She can’t look him in the eye, can’t look at anything, as she drops her hand to her sidearm and draws her badge from her pocket.

Whatever she says (the words lost in the haze enveloping her, dimming the pain of giving up the career that’s been the only thing she’s wanted to do since she was twelve years old), it doesn’t matter. The end result is the same.

She walked onto that dock as an FBI agent, and she walks off it as a free agent.

Free and drifting, tetherless and alone. But with a purpose nonetheless.

* * *

Nathan picks her up for work the next morning. It should be awkward, meeting him again, seeing him, everything back to normal (she wonders if he had pancakes for breakfast; if he made extra before he remembered she wasn’t there). Should be, but somehow, it’s not. Or at least, she thinks, not as awkward as she expected.

He’s quiet, and he doesn’t say much, and he doesn’t get out to open her car door, but she’s been trying to train him out of the habit anyway, and he never says much, and she’s not exactly a top notch conversationalist this morning either. So maybe it is awkward, and maybe it isn’t; either way, she pretends that everything’s fine between them (and he showed up without comment, so he must be pretending too).

“Parker,” he begins, when they’re nearly to the station. He shifts in his seat, his hand clenching the wheel until she wants to lean over and loosen his fingers before he bruises his palm. “I…there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about…”

A fist clenches a death-grip over her heart. Audrey stares straight ahead and tries to think of something funny to say, some reason to flash a smirk and a mocking rejoinder over at him. She doesn’t want to hear this, doesn’t want to hear him say that he thinks it best if they don’t see each other again. He tried being a cop (he’d told her, tried to warn her; a plea she hadn’t recognized or heeded), and it ‘didn’t suit,’ and all that means is that he still has nightmarish memories of a father who was worse than a monster, who brutalized a young boy and brought him into his own private hell of complete sensory isolation.

But she didn’t listen, and she asked something of him when she knew he wouldn’t say no, and she’d seen him that day, how quiet and closed down he was, listened to him spill out confessions of a life she’d never realized, traumas she couldn’t quite make herself envision (couldn’t _stop_ herself envisioning until late hours of the night, making her sick and pale and afraid to close her eyes). She’d brought all that pain of his past roaring back into his life, and she doesn’t blame him for wanting to go back to his safe (secluded) life.

She doesn’t blame him (she doesn’t, even if she wants to grab him and never let go), but she doesn’t want to hear the words.

“Nathan,” she says, and he quiets and stills without comment. “I know that what happened is…well, it shouldn’t have happened.”

His silence is absolute, his stillness almost frightening. “Oh,” he says after a long moment, and inexplicably, she thinks he is disappointed (hurt). “Okay.”

His scent is all around her, encasing her in his presence, making it impossible to get a fresh breath of air. His eyes are fixed straight ahead, intensity and sincerity directed elsewhere. She thinks he is pretending to be unaffected (thinks he is bleeding out in front of her again), and she can’t quite figure out why.

Except…maybe he isn’t trying to talk about the day at his house when fire had almost taken him from her (because he never did seem scared, and even when he spilled secrets at her feet, he didn’t seem regretful). Maybe he’s talking about something else (when a heartbeat juddered beneath her cheek and cooled warmth wrapped her in strong arms and there was a moment of serenity before confusion).

“I mean,” she says quickly, watching him out of the corner of her eye, “even asking if you’d be willing to set yourself up as a target was too much. I should never have put you in that position to start with and—”

“No.” He looks over at her, his eyes soft and warm, that terrible stillness gone from him. There is the slightest hint of a smile at the corners of his lips. “I’m glad I could help. I’m glad you asked.”

It’s her turn to say, “Oh,” and look away (intimidated by the sheer _meaning_ coloring his words).

They fade back into companionable quiet broken only by Audrey’s soft sigh of relief. It isn’t until he’s parked in front of the station and turned to stare at her expectantly when she fails to get out and throw him her customary wave and “Don’t get into too much trouble without me!” that she realizes _she_ has something to tell him. And since he doesn’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to pick up the thread of the conversation he started, she decides to just say it.

“Agent Howard told me to leave Haven,” she blurts out. “He came expecting a report, and what I had wasn’t exactly something he could rationalize. So…he told me to leave.”

Nathan is angled in his seat toward her. He’s watching her, his gaze picking up every move she makes. She feels, suddenly, as if he is soaking her in. As if the slightest move she makes, breath she takes, noise she emits is something that he absorbs completely inside him (as if she touches him without ever once reaching out a hand to bridge the distance between).

“What are you going to do?” he finally asks. Simply. Tonelessly.

And finally Audrey finds a reason to turn and grin at him. “I told him I was staying, of course. I don’t think this town can get along without me. Or you—what _did_ you do with your days before I got here, anyway?”

His chuckle sounds suspiciously like an echo of the relieved sigh she made moments earlier. “I probably actually wrote a few articles,” he says.

She shrugs that away. “You write plenty; I know, I read them.”

“You do?” His eyes widen, just a fraction.

“Yeah,” she says, and she means to make a crack about there not being much else to do in Haven and no other papers to read, but there’s a hint of delight in his eyes (and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen that before, swirled through sea-blue), so she turns her smirk into a friendly smile. “Yeah, I do. Every day.”

He looks away, but not before she catches a glimpse of his smile. “So,” he comments after a moment. “You’re staying.”

It’s half a question and half a statement and hearing him say it makes it finally sink in for real.

“Yeah,” she says again. He’s turned so that she can’t even see his smile anymore (except a faded, silvery reflection of it in his window), but her answering smile is firm and fixed on her lips. “I’m staying.”

Nathan swallows and gives a hint of a nod, and when he swivels his head to look at her, Audrey feels as if he has sucked out all the air in the cab. “I’m glad,” he says (she thinks it is the first time he’s volunteered any information at all on his emotional state).

“Me, too,” she replies, and they continue to sit there.

He got her to the station in plenty of time, but later Garland asks her why she came in late, and Audrey only smiles and shrugs.

* * *

“So you’re here for good,” Garland observes as he saunters into her office, hands in his pockets, searching for his Nicotine gum.

Audrey looks up at him (tries not to glare, because Nathan doesn’t seem to hold Garland’s decision to use his own son as bait against him, so she should move past it too). “Yeah,” she says dryly. “I believe that’s what I meant when I told you I quit the FBI.”

“Huh.” He lets out a long, loud sigh. When his hands fall still, empty at his sides, Audrey knows there’s something more going on than he’s saying ( _of course_ , she thinks, because he never lets on about _anything_ he doesn’t think she needs to know). She’s learned, in the past month, that he is never still. He fidgets, he moves, he shuffles his feet, but he never simply stands. Yet here he is, standing and staring at her—not directly, but out of the corner of his eye.

“Something wrong with that?” she finally asks impatiently. “Don’t tell me you’re not going to let me stay on here?”

She means it as a joke (what else is there to do in Haven? Why would he turn her away _now_ when he’s been using her even as he grumbled about her federal ties?), but feels her weight almost double when he swings his head and glares at her.

There’s a frozen moment, both of them arrested (her by sudden disbelief and fear; him by what she’d swear is indecision).

Finally, he lets out a scoffing breath and shakes his head in that slow, ponderous way of his. “Wouldn’t do me any good,” he pronounces. “You’d still show up and somehow or other everyone would end up letting you do whatever you wanted.”

Relieved (but inwardly rolling her eyes at herself for taking his usual dour mood so seriously), she flashes him a cocky grin. “It’s called being friendly, and you should try it sometime.”

“I did, once,” he states, startling her. There’s something even worse than bleakness in his tone; something very much like despondent resignation. “It got me stuck with a partner who left at the worst possible time and didn’t come back the right way. Trust me, I won’t make the same mistake twice.”

Without another word, he turns and stumps out of her office, leaving her wondering if he’s talking about the same partner who was killed by a chameleon (the partner whose face he’d looked into when he pulled the trigger).

“Well,” she observes to herself. “Never a dull day at the office.”

* * *

“I’m making pancakes tonight,” Nathan says a few days later.

She looks up from her paperwork, surprised to see him leaning against the doorframe of her office (the Wuornos men apparently share a liking for abrupt entrances and an equal disregard for casual greetings). He usually waits for her outside the station, usually avoids his father, usually comes to talk to her only under the cover of driving her from place to place. For all those reasons, she’s justified for feeling her breath catch in her throat and her heart skip a beat at the sight of him (at the sight of the small, warm smile cracking the veneer of his stoicism), but she knows none of those are the real reason for her reaction.

It’s been a week since he dived at a pyrokinetic for her and was almost turned to blistered ash and bone for his efforts. It’s been four days since she told him she’s staying in town. And it’s been three days since she’s had a real conversation with him that doesn’t involve how many cats she tried to put in a box, how much work Dave and Vince have been throwing his way, or lessons on how to get to all the important places in Haven (she’s determined not to get lost again should she ever need to drive on her own; a wise precaution, she feels, now that she’s staying here permanently). Three days without saying much of anything, and longer than that since the conversation where they both said more than ever before. And where she’s not afraid to force the issue with Duke, she has (for reasons she can’t quite explain to herself), been hesitant to risk confronting the matter head-on with Nathan. (Maybe because she’s less sure of the outcome, and less sure that she can live with whatever happens because of it.)

But here he is, a couple hours earlier than he usually comes to get her, in the station he avoids like the plague, smiling openly, his feet almost in her office, and making what seems to be the beginnings of an invitation.

“Nathan,” she says (because she wants to; because she likes saying his name and seeing his stiffness ease ever so slightly at the sound of it). But he’s waiting, and _smiling_ , so she adds, “I’m fairly certain that all evidence points to you making pancakes _most_ days.”

He shrugs. His feet daringly edge a bit farther over the threshold of the office, a bit nearer her. “These are special, though. My mom’s secret recipe. ‘Course, it makes more than even I can eat.” He stops then, abruptly, as if he’s said too much. As if even one word over some magical number of syllables will scare her off. But Audrey doesn’t need him to say more. Her own smile is more of a grin and spreads over her lips until she feels it straining her cheeks (and grows softer when Nathan’s own determined smile warms in response).

“Secret recipe?” she teases. “Who could resist that?”

He actually chuckles, a release of breath (a sigh of relief) that has his shoulders slumping, some of his ever-present tension uncoiling. “Exactly my thought. Plus, though I thought about surprising you with it,” he adds, a bit more seriously, “I have something to show you. An article I found misfiled in the archives. It’s from just after the Colorado Kid’s death and it mentions Lucy.”

She opens her mouth to demand more information, to ask where the article is, her every sense on the alert (it’s been so long since she’s learned anything new in the search for her mom), to push him until he relents and gives her the full story, but the words (and the moment) snap like a frayed rubber band when Duke comes bounding onto the scene.

“Audrey!” he exclaims, loudly enough for most everyone in the station to hear (jovially enough for that tension to come marching back into the rigid line of Nathan’s shoulders). Duke steps into Audrey’s office as if he’s never noticed the door, or the threshold, or any tentative barriers preventing him from entering. “Hey, Nate,” Duke greets the journalist easily, a line on his brow all that gives away his surprise, before he turns to Audrey and rubs his hands in anticipation. “So, I have just the menu planned for our dinner tonight.”

Audrey silently curses his timing (and her own, for finally accepting his long-offered bet in an attempt to further repair their friendship; and even Nathan’s, for finally deciding to start talking to her again on the _one_ night she has plans).

“Menu,” she hears herself say, awkward and stilted, so much so that Duke squints at her and Nathan looks away, his hands tucked protectively in his pockets. “Dinner. Right. That was tonight.”

“Oh, come on,” Duke groans exaggeratedly. “Please tell me you’re not blowing me off already! I knew I’d win our bet, but I figured you wouldn’t admit it so soon!”

“No, no!” Audrey says immediately (she already owes Duke enough without adding more favors to his side of the board), but then bites her tongue. Out of the corner of her eye (she can’t quite dare look at him directly), she sees Nathan shrink, fade in that way he has as if he can flick a switch and become suddenly _less_ visible. “No,” she says again, more quietly, her gaze solidly placed between Duke and Nathan.

“Really.” Duke flicks a look at her, then to Nathan, then back to her. “Because I’m sensing some major awkwardness here.”

“No,” Nathan interrupts. He straightens (lifts that burden he’d set aside so temporarily), and takes a step backward, out of her office completely. “No problems at all.”

Audrey opens her mouth but can’t get his name to emerge (and she should really be afraid of the effect he has on her, for all the things she can’t do, can’t say, can’t dare around him).

“I’ll see you later, Parker.” Nathan catches her eye and air flutters in her chest, trapped with nowhere to go. “I’ll bring the article with me tomorrow morning,” he says, “or if you want to swing by the _Herald_ and get it yourself, I can print it out this afternoon.”

And he’s gone, slipping away like smoke through the station, leaving scarcely a ripple in his wake (a wave and a nod from Stan and a few other officers who haven’t forgotten the pyrokinetic serial killer and Nathan’s part in bringing him down but not even the merest showing of his father).

Audrey looks after him for a long moment before she turns back to Duke, determination taking root inside her. “Duke,” she begins.

His smile is more than a bit strained, more like a grimace than his customary amused smirk. “Don’t tell me,” he says with a hand held up between them. “I win our bet?”

Tucking her lips inside her mouth in a look of apology, she nods. “I’ll make it up to you,” she promises.

“Oh, I know you will,” he says, maybe a bit too enthusiastically. “Trust me, I never forget when people owe me.”

He means to frighten her, but Duke is all bark and (almost) no bite, so she only smiles and pats his shoulder. “Thanks, Duke. Really, we’ll reschedule.”

She flips off her computer, shoves her not-quite-completed paperwork in the first drawer that looks to have room for it, and breezes out of the office. (She pretends not to hear Duke’s muttered, “I doubt it.”) Nathan left several minutes before, and he made it pretty clear he assumes Duke is driving her from work, so she doesn’t waste any time leaving the station. Luckily for her, she left her car parked here a while before, and a bit of digging in her jacket pockets produces the dusty key.

She hurries, because this is the first time Nathan has peremptorily and overtly reached out to her, and she doesn’t want him to retreat and never try again.

She hurries, because it’s best to right misconceptions sooner rather than later.

She hurries, because she _wants_ to see Nathan, wants to talk to him and find out what’s been bothering him more than the usual (wants to slip back inside his home and pretend that she has a place there, that he wants her there even when there isn’t a killer targeting him).

It’s the first time she’s knocked at his door, but she doesn’t let her nervousness show when he opens his door a moment later (and this is why she isn’t afraid of his effect, because he also makes her braver and bolder and so much more sure of herself, the _her_ behind the badge that’s not hers anymore). Instead, she smiles brightly at his impassive surprise. “You said it was a _secret_ recipe,” she teases (a bit breathlessly), “and you know how I feel about secrets in this town.”

His smile is slow and guarded and unpracticed. And so very, very perfect.

* * *

“So this article,” she begins when there’s only the residue of Butterworth syrup left on their plates.

“It may not be as much as you’re hoping,” Nathan cautions her. “It’s dated a couple days after the Colorado Kid death, and all it says is that a local woman had gone missing. But there is a picture.”

“A picture,” Audrey breathes out.

Nathan shifts in his chair. “It doesn’t give much information, just the mention of her disappearing and the question about whether it was tied to the Colorado Kid’s death or not. Since she was in the picture of that article about the Colorado Kid, it only makes sense that her disappearance so soon after his death would be of some note. But the article doesn’t actually have any answers.”

“No, it’s great,” she says sincerely. She reaches out to place a hand over his (to comfort the nervousness evident in his voice) but stops herself just in time. “Really,” she says to cover the slip, a bit awkwardly, “the least little thing could be helpful. I haven’t exactly gotten anywhere chasing down my own leads, such as they are.”

He doesn’t reply, though, and she looks up to see him staring at her hand. His own hands, settled on either side of his empty plate, are trembling.

“Nathan?” She studies him closely.

He jerks his eyes up to meet hers. “Sorry,” he blurts, a flush staining his cheeks.

Audrey’s brows arch upward. “Oookay,” she drawls. “Sorry for what?”

The expression his face morphs into is familiar by now, mingled uncertainty and determination and maybe even a hint of fear (she’s seen it a handful of times now, when he came to her motel room during the beginning of the serial murderer case, when he was driving her to the station just after she quit the FBI; every time, she realizes, that he brings up the night of their shadow siege). She has the sudden realization that this dinner is not just about wanting to get past the formality their relationship has fallen into. Not just wanting her over for dinner (not because he missed her now that she’s not staying with him).

“There’s something I have to tell you,” Nathan states soberly. He meets her gaze, and she feels as if they have reverted back to the first day they met, when he studied her so curiously and she could not read him at all. “But I don’t want it to ruin anything.”

“Ruin what?” she asks.

His shrug is minimal, half-hearted. He takes a deep breath, moves his hands onto his lap, then puts them back on the table; they are still trembling. “Ruin _anything_ ,” he finally answers, as oblique as ever (it’s ironic that she learned he’s adopted just when she’s finally been able to spot the family resemblance between him and Garland).

“Nathan,” she interrupts him, and before she can talk herself out of it, she reaches out and places her hand over one of his, quieting its tremble. “We’re friends, right? We trust each other?”

“Yeah,” he says, his voice so hoarse it takes her aback. His eyes are riveted on their clasped hands, but Audrey stubbornly keeps her hand where it is (holding back and respecting his boundaries have done nothing but make everything complicated and stilted, so it’s time to start crossing lines and forcing the issue).

“Then whatever you have to tell me won’t ruin anything,” she promises him, and is rewarded by the hint of a smile, like the cracks along dark storm-clouds reminding you there actually is a sun behind their roiling surface.

“All right.” He slides his hand out from under hers, slowly and gently, as if he doesn’t want her to take offense (she tries her best not to), and meets her gaze, his own impenetrable. His voice is rock-steady, with nothing to give away the strain she can tell it requires of him. “Parker, I can feel you.”

She stares at him. All right, she admits it—she does more than stare. She actually gapes at him. “You—” she begins (because she doesn’t like being speechless), but that is all (because she _is_ speechless).

“When I hugged—when you hugged—” He takes a deep breath; his composure is cracking along the seams. “When _we_ hugged, and you put your hand on my neck…I could feel it.”

“So…” She squints up at him, tilts her head and tries to read him. “All this time, you…you can feel me.”

“Yeah.” He says it simply. Starkly. Unashamedly. (But she does know him, has learned how to read him in the weeks since that first day; she sees how very unsure he is.) His hands are still trembling, though he’s placed them flat against the table. “I was going to tell you.” He regards her evenly. “But I didn’t want it to be uncomfortable for you while you were staying here with me.”

“Uncomfortable,” she repeats, a slight frown creasing her brow. “Why would it be uncomfortable?”

A flash of something passes across his features faster than she can interpret. “Oh,” is all he says. “I just…”

“Just what?”

“Just,” he admits reluctantly (as if he makes the admission against his better judgment), “don’t want this to mean more than…our friendship.”

Sudden compassion floods past her shock, rips all disbelief aside and fills her up from the inside out with empathy and the understanding of what it is to be on the outside looking in. He is alone, but she is here now, and they are friends, and if she can touch him (can give him back even a fraction of what he gives her), then there is nothing wrong with that. Nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to put those shadows in his eyes and that hesitance in his voice.

So, confidently, resolutely, she reaches out and puts a hand over each of his. She watches him closely as she does and notices the instant astonishment turning sea-blue into sky-blue, notices the catch in his breathing, the startlement that floods his veins with steel and paints his cheekbones with color. She watches him, and she sees his world come alive and full and real before him once again.

And she watches as he takes control of himself once again, in the flicker of an eye, the duration of a blink. Breathes in. Loosens his muscles. Looks back at her (but he cannot erase or hide the awe that still swims in his eyes, touching his every look and expression).

“It’s okay, Nathan,” she tells him. “You’re the only person I can trust, and this doesn’t change that. I’d never had a friend until you.”

“Me neither,” he says softly. “Not really.”

“Well, you do now. And I’m not going anywhere.”

His incredulous, wondrous smile (the feel of his hands relaxing into stillness beneath hers) quiets all of Audrey’s own inner doubts.

* * *

The copy of the article Nathan gave her the next morning when driving her into work sits on Audrey’s desk. It’s just a piece of paper, just ink and faded words, torn and frayed, but it fits next to the Colorado Kid article, two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle (except she doesn’t know what picture this puzzle is supposed to show her when it’s completed). “Local woman goes missing,” the headline reads, beside the picture of a brunette half-turned away from the camera. Her and yet _not_ her at the same time. And across from the half column story rests the other article with its grainy picture of Lucy on the beach (like she’s looking in a time-worn mirror).

More mysteries, she thinks. No answers, no solutions or revelations, just the extra questions about a woman who vanished a mere day after the Colorado Kid’s death.

“Who are you _really_?” Audrey whispers. She lays her hand almost against the matching, disparate articles, one given her by Vince and Dave, the other by their reclusive reporter. She’s been here for months, and she’s still nowhere nearer an answer than before. Her mother was in Haven, helping the Troubled, so why did she leave? Where did she go? How could she abandon all the Troubled?

Or did she not leave willingly?

“Talking to yourself again?”

Audrey looks up and smiles to see Duke ambling in and tossing himself on her couch.

“I’ve heard that’s a sign of madness.” He waves his hands in a spooky gesture to accompany his stage-whispered comment.

“I’m not talking to myself,” she says with an obligatory roll of her eyes. “I’m talking to Lucy.”

Duke gives her a look, one of his trademark ‘this is so obvious, what’s wrong with you that you don’t get it’ looks. “And that makes it better because…why, exactly?”

“Because I’m hoping I can find Lucy.” Audrey shakes her head and scoots the newer article toward him, little more than a blip. “But maybe that’s not possible at all.”

Maybe, she thinks with her heart sinking into her stomach, her search was hopeless even before she began it. Maybe her answers won’t be found in a newspaper article or in an unusually forthcoming Troubled person or in any of the leads she’s tried to find thus far. (Maybe her answers are buried in an unmarked grave or on the bottom of the ocean floor, winnowed away to nothing more than unidentified bones.)

Standing and moving so he can read the article, Duke’s humor gives way to soberness (not something she usually attributes to the smuggler, but a quality he’s able to portray so easily it seems almost more natural than his teasing façade). “Audrey,” he says when he looks up (and she knows he’s seeing again all the similarities between her and the woman in grainy black and white). “Not to shrug off how hard this is going to be, but…isn’t this what you do? You’re a detective, right? I mean, come on, you solve mysteries almost every day—mysteries that should be unsolvable by every natural law—and all because you know how to do more than put together clues. You know how to solve _people_. And Lucy Ripley…” Duke gives her a soft, warm smile that makes it hard to breathe past the affection she feels for him in that moment. “Well, Audrey Parker, Lucy Ripley is a person. So just solve her.”

She could help herself, but she chooses not to, just gives into impulse and clasps his hand in tactile gratitude. “Thanks, Duke,” she says. “How do you always know the right thing to say?”

His smirk makes her laugh and restores him to her mocking, jovial friend. “Natural talent,” he shrugs. “Can’t be taught. There is a fee, though.”

“Oh, right.” Audrey rolls her eyes again and drops his hand. “Dinner, right?”

“Dinner?” Duke gives her a mock-insulted glare. “Don’t think small, Officer Parker. Two words for you: parking tickets.”

She laughs again, and for the moment, she is able to forget the articles on her desk.

* * *

“You think he’s a ghost?” Nathan asks, and if there’s a hint of disbelief in his voice even after all this time and all the impossibilities they’ve seen, Audrey can’t say she exactly blames him. If there’s another thing Haven’s been teaching her, it’s that the impossible happens on a daily basis.

“Well, I don’t know about that.” Audrey shrugs and sinks deeper into the Bronco’s familiar front seat. They’re parked outside of Rosemary’s, coffees cooling in their hands. She’s become used to sitting outside of restaurants (well, outside the three restaurants/diners this small town has); Nathan hates sitting inside long enough to eat a meal or get through a cup of coffee, and considering how he’s treated like a pariah wherever he goes (and now on the receiving end of accusatory glares ever since his picture ran in the paper), Audrey feels more like boycotting the places altogether herself (impossible if she wants to live here, maybe, but it makes her feel better to imagine following through on the urge).

“So he’s _not_ dead?” Nathan’s arched eyebrow makes Audrey laugh despite herself.

“The town assumed he was on the ship when it went down, but his body’s nowhere to be found. His wife insists he wouldn’t have run off without leaving word. And I know I felt _something_ in their house.”

“James Garrick wouldn’t run off,” Nathan affirmed. “He was the coach of my Little League games. A real straight arrow after he got off the bottle.”

Audrey gives him a sloppy smile. “You played Little League?”

Nathan rolls his eyes (she hides another grin to see that she’s successfully corrupted him with the habit). “Duke and I both did.”

“Really?” She loses the battle with herself and lets out her burst of laughter. “I can just see it now. How did you two get along long enough to get through a game?”

“We played opposite ends of the field,” he says dryly. “Can we get back to the case please? You think you felt him in the house?”

After a slight hesitation to make him squirm, she takes pity on him. “I thought it was one of the kids at first. But Brooke certainly isn’t Troubled and even though the boy clearly had some kind of reaction, there was something else in their dad’s old office. I reached out and touched something, and for a minute, I thought I heard a man’s voice.”

“So…” There’s a crease in the center of Nathan’s forehead (there usually is; the man worries too much), as if he’s actually contemplating the ghost theory. “You can touch ghosts?”

“Like I said,” she repeats, “I think there’s a lot more to it. But if I can,” she adds mischievously, “I am _so_ giving the Winchester brothers a run for their money.”

Nathan smiles but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “You think the Bronco can match the Impala?”

“I don’t know.” Audrey makes a show of looking around conspicuously. “It’s roomy and comfortable, and it hasn’t been driven off of any cliffs—and it’s definitely a trademark of yours.”

“Guess I’ll have to come along with you on your ghost-hunting adventures,” Nathan observes. “Which brother does that make me?”

Audrey studies him out of the corner of her eye, trying to figure out why he sounds so absentminded, so distant, even as he banters with her. “Well, I’m the cute one, obviously.”

“Obviously,” he agrees, and she can’t pretend any longer.

“All right.” She angles to face him, careful not to spill her coffee. “What is it? After everything we’ve seen, surely the possibility of ghosts can’t faze you this much?”

“Not ghosts,” he says slowly. He lifts his cup to take a sip of his coffee, but Audrey reaches out and takes it from him. He watches her, expressionless, as she checks the temperature and gives him a brief nod. It’s not until she’s handing it back to him—her hand around the cup, his fingers curling over hers so tentatively, so warily—that she finds herself caught by her own discomfort.

_“Why would it be uncomfortable?”_ she’d asked him so blithely. So cluelessly.

It shouldn’t be, she thinks with a hint of frustration. It should be as simple as she told him it was (promised him it would be), but now, every time she sees him, every time they’re alone together, every time there’s a silent moment, she feels herself caught by glaring uncertainty, anxious doubt. Should she reach out and hold his hand whenever she can (just so he can finally feel something after years of being so completely cut off)? Should she make sure she doesn’t touch him at _all_ (so he isn’t overwhelmed by contact he isn’t used to)? Does he _want_ to feel her? Does he wish he couldn’t? Does he fantasize about touching her, about feeling sensations between their palms? Or is he afraid of her? Trapped by the numbness that has become his normal?

She doesn’t know, and she can’t bring herself to ask questions so personal, so intimate (so potentially damaging), so her palms begin to sweat whenever she sees him and her fingertips itch and her mind works overtime to come up with stupid jokes and flippant comments just to make sure he doesn’t know how very off-balance she is (because she promised him this wouldn’t change anything between them, wouldn’t ruin or hamper their friendship).

Nathan meets her gaze when his fingers graze against hers, and he swallows but doesn’t comment on it. He takes his cup from her and swallows a sip with a murmured, “Thanks.”

“No problem,” she says, hastily looking away, taking a sip of her own warm coffee to hide her moment of awkwardness. She wraps both her hands around the cup as if that is sufficient excuse for not reaching out and making the world three-dimensional for him again.

“It’s not ghosts I’m afraid of,” Nathan finally says when the silence is just about to become uncomfortable. “But if you can touch him…”

She still doesn’t get it for a long moment, but when she does, it hits her like a two-by-four between the eyes. “Oh!” she exclaims.

Of course.

Of _course_.

He can feel her when he can feel nothing else, and for him, she cannot even imagine what that must seem like. But now, here she comes, casually mentioning she can reach out and touch what might or might not be a dead man. A ghost (and that’s what everyone already treats _him_ like, isn’t it?).

“It’s not that,” she blurts. “Really. I mean, I don’t think Garrick was ever dead. I think…I think he moves really fast, maybe so fast no one can see him, and if it’s a Trouble he can’t turn off, then I think he’d be trapped like he is. And even if they can’t see him or hear him, he still wants to protect his family.”

“Huh.” Nathan doesn’t speak for a long moment. “The question is, what caused his Trouble to activate?”

Audrey nods, grateful for the distraction from their own personal specter hovering over them during quiet moments. “Right. They all seem to start happening when there’s some kind of stress applied, some kind of emotional upheaval.”

“And they’re passed down through families,” Nathan prompts when she falls silent.

“What?” She blinks at him, then nods belatedly. “Yes. So the Wests would seem to prove, and the Garricks, too, if that’s what the boy was doing.”

Nathan watches her, clearly waiting for more, but she zones out again, staring straight ahead out the window, at the empty Americana street with its small shopfronts and shady trees and the far-distant view of the harbor. She’s thinking about what they just said, thinking about everything she’s learned about the Troubles and Haven (this refuge for God’s orphans), and suddenly, all she can think about, all she can wonder, is what happened to wake Nathan’s Trouble up again.

Twenty-seven years ago, the Troubles had come to Haven, and during that time, Nathan’s own father beat him bloody, activating his Trouble. But then they’d gone away, and he could feel again, and he must have thought he was safe. Only…only he’d said it’d been years since he could feel anything. Years since the Troubles started coming back, and it suddenly occurs to her that she never asked him how his curse was stirred from its slumber. How many Troubled people has she asked? How many suspects she thinks might be afflicted? But for whatever reason (his aversion to answering questions, his habit of deflecting the conversation whenever it turns to him, or just because she has become so intent on never treating him as the rest of the town does that she overcompensates), she has never even thought to ask him.

“Parker?”

At his worried voice, she turns her head to meet his gaze. “Sorry,” she says with a slight shake of her head.

“You okay?” The simple question, so unadorned in its concern, sends a spark of something sharp and electric through her heart. Makes her smile a crooked, shaky smile and take in a trembling breath.

“Yeah,” she replies. And she can’t ask him. Can’t delve past what he’s willing to give her. Can’t pry into his life when she already asks too much of him. (Can’t look at him while he spills out more of his own secrets and see even more of his life-blood leaking out of invisible wounds.) “So,” she says again, with maybe a bit too much determination. “Besides the ship going down, what could have happened to make James Garrick crack?”

* * *

The very next day, less than twenty-four hours later, she’s sitting on the beach in almost the exact same spot where the Colorado Kid’s body was found, and she’s staring at a scar on her foot, and the entire world is shifting on its foundations around her, sliding in its orbit, careening among the stars so that she feels as if she’s on the biggest roller coaster ever designed and it’s called _Life In Haven_.

It’s impossible. It’s surreal. It defies description. But not belief, because this is, after all, Haven, and maybe it’s easier to believe that she _is_ Lucy than that she had a mother who lived here and helped the Troubled and gave her a legacy to live up to. Maybe this is her own Trouble, except it seems more and more possible that she is immune to the Troubles, so she’s not quite sure how that would work. But then, who is she kidding? She doesn’t know how _any_ of this works, has not been able to do anything but coast along in the wake of Haven, those deceptive riptides Duke warned her about, thrashing around in currents so much deeper and darker than is possible anywhere else in the world.

Solve the person, Duke told her, but how can she solve herself?

_She_ is Lucy. Was Lucy. Maybe will be Lucy again, if her lost memories come pouring back, or if whatever made her Audrey Parker disappears.

She is surprised (astonished and taken aback and sickened) by the sudden lightning surge of denial that swells up within her until she is gasping and trembling on the beach, one shoe on, the other off.

She does not want to lose Audrey. She does not want to lose Garland’s dour gloom or Vince and Dave’s considering looks or Stan’s friendly greetings or Duke’s friendship. Or Nathan.

She does not want to lose who she is.

And yet…she already has. She was Lucy Ripley but isn’t anymore (cannot even imagine herself as this fathomless woman with a familiar face and unfamiliar hair). She is Audrey Parker now, but who knows how easily that can be ripped from her. Who knows how long she can remain here. Can be safe. Can keep all the promises she has so easily, so thoughtlessly, given out to so many people in this town.

The world continues to shift around her, and she alone feels as if she is still, the eye in the center of the storm while everything else goes swirling violently about her. She feels as if perhaps she is watching the debris of her life (her _current_ life, anyway) being swept away, outside her reach, past her understanding.

She is still, and she is alone, and she cannot reach outside herself for support or anchoring or help (and she wonders if this is what Nathan feels like all the time), and this spot of beach (that once held a body, that once supported her own feet in different shoes and different personality and different memories) is all that is real and solid and unimpeachable.

And it is not enough.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry it's been so long -- I'm in the process of finalizing a move, and that and work are taking all my time and energy! Anyway, here's the penultimate chapter of season 1, and it's where things really start coming into play! Despite the fact that we really didn't see him do much beyond talk and smile, Max Hansen has always severely creeped me out, so trying to write him was certainly interesting! I hope you all enjoy despite the unexpected hiatus!

She is in her office, contemplating playing hooky to go walk the beach in the picture (to place herself where _she_ once stood before, in another lifetime), and still trying to wrap her brain around this latest revelation Haven has dealt her (trying to figure out how to even put this into the words she needs to tell Nathan), when Garland interrupts her morning with as little ceremony as usual.

“Max Hansen’s in town,” he growls, flopping down on the couch across from her.

Audrey watches him carefully, and rolls her pen between her fingers as she attempts to pry her mind off Lucy Ripley and unexplained scars and altered hair colors long enough to make a reply. Not that she knows _what_ to say. Her relationship (if it can be called that) with Garland is nothing if not strained. Despite all the times he’s helped her (from his office or hers, grousing the whole way as if she cannot see the gleam in his eye that tells her he doesn’t entirely begrudge the time), he’s still unnecessarily obstructive, tight-lipped to the point of driving her insane. And he treats Nathan as if he’s ashamed of him. As if Nathan has disappointed him simply by existing. So, consequently, _her_ relationship with the chief is tense, wary and tenuous.

Still, she can’t help but entertain the idle notion of blurting out that she _is_ Lucy Ripley just so she can see his reaction.

“Max Hansen,” he says again, and if she didn’t know any better, she’d think he’s scared. Terrified.

As abruptly as he entered and sat down, he jumps (or as close to it as he ever does) to his feet. Runs a hand through his hair, demonstrating why it looks as disheveled as if he just rolled out of bed.

“I’m assuming that means something important,” Audrey finally says, because he looks as if he’ll come apart at the seams if she keeps silent.

“ _Important_?” he repeats incredulously. “Oh, yeah, I’d say it’s important. He was the prime suspect for the Colorado Kid murder.”

“ _What_?” Audrey gapes up at him, the pen dropping from suddenly still fingers.

Garland turns his back on her and scowls out at the station at large. Contradictorily, he lets his left hand fall to rest gently on the extra desk in the corner, the one she used to complain about before Nathan sat there while they waited for a serial killer to attack him. Garland touches the desk as it it’s all that keeps him together. As if it means something so much more than Audrey’s ever realized.

“Never could prove it,” he admits after a moment. “But I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s the sort of man…well, let’s just say there wasn’t much _human_ left in him.”

Audrey nods, unfortunately familiar with the type of man who can rationalize inflicting pain and murder (trembling inside at the memory of flames and burnt pancakes and white bandages over senseless skin). “If you had a suspect in hand, why didn’t you tell me?” she demands, zeroing in on what’s most important. “I can question him, can ask if _he_ remembers anything about Lucy—”

“Even if he knew anything, he wouldn’t tell you,” the chief interrupts. He looks as if he’s considering throwing himself back on the couch, but he looks down at where his hand rests and doesn’t move. “He’s spent the past twenty-five years in Shawshank Prison for killing a whole family. He was supposed to be in there till the day he did us all a favor and died, but instead someone pulled some strings and got him out on parole. Now he’s in town, madder than a hornet at me and everyone else involved in getting him put away to begin with, and he won’t stop until—” He cuts himself off abruptly, eyes wide, chest heaving, his hair sticking up in every available direction. To Audrey, he’s always seemed like a volcano waiting impatiently to erupt, but now he just looks like an old, weathered man at the end of his rope. And he is scared, terrified beyond all reason of something she doesn’t have enough knowledge to understand.

“Until what?” she asks carefully, as gently as if he’s another Troubled person unaware of what his roiling emotions have caused and cost.

“Until there’s nothing left for me,” he says, so quietly it’s no more than the shushing motion of the waves against the site of the Colorado Kid’s death. There’s no anger left, only desperate fear and resigned desolation.

And despite her own anger and frustration, Audrey feels a frisson of dread tremble at the base of her throat, tumble down her spine to shatter and froth at the pit of her stomach.

Nathan.

He’s all Garland Wuornos has. All he cares about (no matter how gruff and aloof he acts around Nathan himself).

If Max Hansen wants to hurt Garland (not the chief, but the man), he’ll go after Nathan.

Audrey’s eyes meet Garland’s and neither of them have to say a word. The old man simply nods at her.

“Nathan’s his son,” he admits in a gruff whisper. “And my wife…she was Max Hansen’s before she freed herself from him. He blames me for everything that’s happened to him—blames me and the Teagues for getting him locked up where he belongs. I’m…” He meets her eyes, and Audrey is shocked (and scared) to see his desperate plea scrawled across beaten features. “I’m afraid of what he’s going to do. Nathan…he doesn’t remember everything, and he and I have never gotten along as well—”

“He remembers enough,” Audrey says, swallowing back bile at the memory of those quiet words in a chaotic living room, those mortal wounds he’d let her see so briefly before covering them back up again. “This Hansen…he can’t feel anything either, can he?”

“No,” Garland says, and now he places both his hands palm-down on the empty desk and leans against it, head bowed, shoulders hunched (the volcano capped beneath the heavy weight of tons of grief and guilt; the mountain rattled and shaken into submission).

“And he feels like Nathan is his? Like you stole his wife and son from him?”

“He threw them in the street,” Garland says in a choked voice. “He tore them to pieces and then left them, but he…he always wants what he shouldn’t have.”

“All of this,” Audrey says, calmly, voice trembling (heart coiling and constricting in an iron grip), “all of this, you know Nathan’s in danger—and you’re _here_? Why aren’t you with him? Why haven’t you given him protection?”

“Hansen won’t kill him.” A shudder runs down Garland’s back, crinkling the stiffness of his blue shirt and marring the hunched rigidity of his posture. “He prefers to manipulate people, mess with their heads and their hearts. He may not be able to feel anything, but he sure knows how to take advantage of the fact that other people _can_. And with Nathan sharing his affliction…he’ll know exactly how to get in his head, how to approach him in a way none of the rest of us can.”

Audrey flinches (because Nathan _does_ hold himself back behind a strict self-control, a barrier of incomprehensible pain that she can never cross because she can’t fully imagine what it must be like to _be_ him; but she hates the reminder, hates to think of him carrying his own cross) before she’s up and grabbing her jacket. “I don’t care what Hansen plans to do,” she says, taken aback by the blatant fierceness coating her voice. “I’m not letting him get Nathan. Now are you coming?”

Garland presses his hands harder against the surface of the bare desk. “I’m going to lose him,” he says, his voice like two stones squeezing pain between them, grinding him up and spitting him back out. “Hansen knows what to say, how to say it. Nathan will listen to him, he’ll—”

“I don’t have time for this!” Audrey doesn’t care, in that moment, that this is her boss, her maybe-almost friend. She only cares about the fact that Nathan’s a target, he’s in danger, and she should be with him, not _here_ , bemoaning what hasn’t even (better not have) happened yet. “I’m going to go find Nathan.”

“Audrey…” The chief can’t say anything more, his voice choked, and despite her anger and fierce desire to protect Nathan, Audrey feels herself soften. She knows what it’s like to be afraid of losing someone (losing _Nathan_ ), and it wasn’t so long ago that the memory, the echo of that same fear, doesn’t still sting.

“I’ll…” She swallows, twitches her lips. “I’ll call you when I find him.”

“Thanks.” The word is so soft it’s almost not spoken at all. Better to pretend it wasn’t, she decides, sure that if they acknowledge it, they might both shatter. So she turns and runs, the jacket tangling up around her arms before she can yank it on correctly and jump into the touchy rental car she doesn’t know why she still bothers with (except having it now, when she _needs_ it to get to Nathan, makes it all worthwhile, every payment and insurance rate and moment of irritation when it won’t start on cold mornings).

She’s a local cop now, even if her detective status still sets her apart, and she’s fairly certain that she could write herself almost every possible ticket for her driving on the way to the _Haven Herald_ and still not be able to comprehend just how badly she’s driving, but she can’t concern herself with such matters now, not when there’s a monster in town come for Garland and all too willing to view Nathan as collateral damage.

Her brakes squeal in protest as she pulls up haphazardly beside the _Herald_ building, and she’s out of the car almost before the engine’s off, the keys torn from her hand and left, half-stuck and swinging wildly, in the ignition, her car door only partly shut.

The door to the _Herald_ swings open easily but sticks halfway (and all she can see is the burned out husk of a hardware store, the scent of charred flesh heavy in her nostrils). Almost frantically, Audrey slides inside, and surveys the wrecked interior in horror (but relief, too, because a mess of papers and desks and computers is so much better than the remnants of bones and the strip of a mysterious tattoo).

“Nathan!” she calls out, and if she wasn’t so busy looking from overturned desk to scattered papers to dented walls, she’d notice how shaky and fragile her voice can sound when saying his name.

“Audrey?”

Her eyes leap to the backdoor leading farther into the building; hope beats like a rapid tempo in her bloodstream, completely inured to the knowledge that the answering voice isn’t Nathan’s.

“Audrey!” Dave comes around the corner, through the door, old newspapers gathered into a bundle he clutches tightly against his chest. His glasses are slightly askew on his nose, his hair sticks up on the right side, but he’s not bleeding or bruised or dead.

“What happened?” she demands.

“One of our old friends showed up,” Dave says bitterly. “I thought he might be after revenge, or even money, but he made up some cockamamie story about wanting a job.”

“And this?” Audrey demands with a nod to the ruin around them.

“Oh, that.” Dave shrugs awkwardly. “Vince came in during our conversation. He and Max don’t get along too well—never have and never will. Vince is all right, a bit banged up, but madder than he is hurt.” Audrey’s not sure what’s on her face (doesn’t have experience in caring for someone enough to feel this terror and panic and gaping _fear_ at even the possibility of him being hurt), but whatever her expression shows, it’s enough to make Dave blanch and set down his papers on an upright chair to hurry toward her. “Don’t worry about the place,” he assures her—awkward comfort, but familiar because of it. “Vince _is_ the one who started it, and they both walked away, so no harm done. We’ll get the place cleaned up in no time.”

“No! No, no, no.” Audrey shakes her head, holds up her hands to ward him off, though he hasn’t tried to touch her. “Nathan. Garland said he’d be after Nathan—where is he?”

“Max? I don’t know where he went. I was too busy trying to talk Vince into going to the hospi—”

“ _No_!” She barely refrains herself from reaching out and shaking the old man’s shoulders. “Where’s _Nathan_? Was he here when Hansen was?”

Dave frowns, and she can’t tell if he’s concerned or irritated, only that he’s disturbed one way or another. “No. We got a report of another crack out in Potter’s Field, and he went to go check it out. He left about an hour ago!” he calls out after her because she’s already running, already out the door and tearing open her car door and fumbling with the keys until the engine starts and she can tear out of town in the direction of Potter’s Field.

She’s so caught up in her panic and urgency and a cold resolution to protect Nathan no matter what (no matter how many killers and monsters and uncaring citizens try to hurt him) that she almost misses it entirely, almost doesn’t even notice the blue Bronco heading back toward town. But it’s blue and it’s _his_ and it’s become more familiar to her than her motel room, so before she can think it through, she slams her brakes and skids to a halt, slanted across the road to stop the Bronco from passing her. Nathan makes his own abrupt halt, and she’s sure he’s staring at her (with that crease in his brow as if he thinks he can puzzle her out, and that tiny almost-smile playing in the shadows of his mouth as if he’s content just trying even if he never finds the solution), or maybe that’s just wishful thinking because if he doesn’t know why she’s here, why she’s jumping out of her car and hurrying toward him, then it means Hansen hasn’t found him yet and he’s safe.

Nathan is safe.

A quaking shudder, a sigh of relief that tremors down her whole body, passes through her when Nathan swings out of the driver’s seat and stands there, watching her come. Audrey runs her eyes up and down his form, looking for blood, for wounds, for broken bones. Finding only familiar solidity, comforting sweaters, sturdy boots, confused blue eyes.

“Nathan,” she says, just because she can, and Nathan frowns at her.

“What’s going on?” he asks. “Are you okay?”

“Are _you_?” Audrey retorts, single-minded. Now that she knows he’s safe, she can start to think again, start to look around and make sure there’s no sign of Hansen (or anyone suspicious, anyone dangerous, anyone who can hurt Nathan). “You haven’t seen anyone out here, have you? Anyone strange approach you? I don’t know what he looks like, but if I’m guessing right, he probably would have set off a few warning bells anyway.”

“No,” Nathan says slowly—humoring her, she can tell, not truly worried. “Why?”

“Wait!” Audrey throws up a hand. “What am I thinking? _You_ know what he looks like—have you seen Max Hansen?”

That, she realizes (far, _far_ too late), is the wrong way to bring up the object of a man’s nightmares (and she can’t believe she didn’t think of that, didn’t _know_ that, after all the times Duke’s gone into minor panic attacks at the mere mention of a man with a tattoo). But she can’t take the revelation back, and Nathan has already gone pale, his eyes wide, his hands suddenly stiff at his sides.

“Max Hansen,” he says quietly. “He’s out of Shawshank?”

She swallows. “Yeah.”

She wants to touch him. She wants to step forward and throw her arms around him and keep him safe and whole against her. But he is rigid, unyielding, locked up behind walls he has spent years (maybe even his entire lifetime) constructing, and she cannot reach past it. Not now, when it is her careless words that have turned him so characteristically still and so _un_ characteristically anxious.

“Your dad said he’s already threatened him; he thought Hansen might come for you next.”

Nathan nods. A stilted, jerky movement, over almost before it begins. “Yeah. Okay.”

And then he’s turning, walking away from her, stepping up into the Bronco, slamming the door between them, deaf to her voice as she calls his name.

“Nathan,” she says again, more for her own benefit than anything.

When he starts up the engine, Audrey decides that she has had enough of waiting and watching. With quick, purposeful strides, she approaches his door, tugs it open, and looks straight at him. He tries to avoid her eyes (an omission so much more effective and subtle when he’s actually driving; so glaring and pointed now), tries to pretend she is not there. But he cannot drive away while she is hanging off his vehicle, and that’s all she cares about.

“Nathan,” she says, firmly (desperately). “What are you thinking? What are you planning? If you think Hansen’s going to hurt you, I can prot—”

“I’ve got this, Parker.” He meets her gaze now, strong and stalwart (so incredibly, frustratingly stubborn). “Vince and Dave said there was a disturbance at the _Herald_ , so I should really get back.”

“But—”

“Please.” He looks away, swallows, looks back to her (her breath is snatched away by the intensity of his stare). She cannot read him at all; she feels, abruptly, as if she is talking to a stranger. “Please, Audrey, just let this go.”

“I can’t,” she whispers.

His lips twitch, the merest movement toward a smile. It made her triumphant to evoke it when she first met him; now it looks paltry and dim compared to what she knows his smiles _can_ look like. “Then let me go. I’ll be fine, I promise.”

His definition of _fine_ is absolutely not the same as hers (he’s claimed to be fine after every injury he’s gained from helping her, every time his eyes have looked bruised from internal wars he fights alone). But what can she do? She can’t arrest him and lock him in a cell for safekeeping until she’s able to grill Hansen and send him back to prison. She can’t talk him out of shutting himself away behind his isolated armor. All she can do is give him a short nod.

All she can do is put her hand over his on the steering wheel (she feels the tightness of his knuckles, and wonders if he can feel it, too, with her skin on his) and tell him, “If you need _anything_ , Nathan, just call me.”

Then she steps back and away. The door is slammed between them, miles of distance widen between them, and (despite her extreme lack of alternatives) Audrey feels as if she has just made a huge mistake.

* * *

She’s barely made it to the station before Duke is there, his bluster and bravado barely covering the desperate anxiety that only comes out whenever a certain tattoo is involved.

“I’m telling you, Audrey, this man is bad news,” he insists, trailing behind her, barely pausing long enough for Stan to tell her Garland was headed for (supposedly) mai tais at the _Herald_ (she’s vaguely relieved because this way, at least, Nathan won’t be completely unguarded) before launching into a more detailed (but still vague, because this is Duke) account of what happened when he came back to the _Cape Rouge_ with groceries to find an ex-con lounging there as if he owns the place.

“Did he say what it is he wants?” Audrey asks. She shuts the door of her office behind them, something she rarely does. It seems wrong (disloyal, really) to tell Duke about Nathan’s biological father, but if she does end up having to reveal the truth, she doesn’t want the whole station listening in.

Duke narrows his eyes at the closed door.

“Duke!” She snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Max Hansen—did he say what he wanted?”

“Oh, I’m sure he really didn’t. All he said was that he wanted to hire me. Something about some fellow con telling him about some money I owed. But the whole thing didn’t make any sense—he claimed to want the money, took off his shirt in some weird posturing move, like he was going to beat it out of me, and then…” Duke waves his hand vaguely. “He just backed off. Like he didn’t care about the money so much as he just wanted to scare me.”

Audrey frowns, tilts her head to try to reorder the pieces, and speaks out loud to drown out the sound of Nathan’s monotone revealing secrets of his childhood. “I don’t understand how all of this ties together. Garland said Hansen’s back to reclaim everything he thinks is his, Dave said he came by to get something from Vince but didn’t want money, and now he’s coming to _you_ for cash?”

“Here to settle old grudges,” Duke says, then throws up a hand, all exasperation and anxiety and impatience. “Though that still doesn’t explain me, because I’m telling you, Audrey, I don’t know him. And he didn’t want the money. He wanted a reaction—but what reaction, well, _that_ I don’t know.”

He pulls out his vibrating phone, glances at the screen, then gives her one of his (trademark by now, surely) exasperated looks. “And he’s at the _Gray Gull_. Wonderful. What next? Should I just give him the keys to my Land Rover?”

“How do you know he’s there?” Audrey asks, already checking to make sure her gun is secure as she starts toward the door.

Duke shrugs. “I tell all my staff to let me know if they see anyone with that tattoo.”

“Smart.” Audrey smiles and shakes her head (a common mixture around the smuggler, she’s found). “So, shall we go meet him?”

“What?” He gapes at her. “Really? Seriously, what part of ‘man with a tattoo is going to kill me’ do you not understand?”

“Come on, Duke.” She smirks. “It’s rude to let someone eat alone. But, fine”—she relents, then, because he doesn’t know what’s at stake, doesn’t know how much danger Nathan could be in, and she can’t tell him—“you stay here. Call me if you see Garland or Nathan—and if you see Nathan, don’t let him go off alone, all right?”

“Nathan? What does he have to do with this? And don’t you have a phone—can’t you just call him yourself? Don’t leave me with all these cops, Audrey. Audrey!”

But she’s already leaving, already out the doors, his stage-whispered shouts left behind. It doesn’t matter. She knows he’ll do as she said. If there is one thing above all others that she knows about Duke, it is that he always, _always_ comes through for her.

* * *

Hansen gives her nothing except the inadvertent confirmation that he has Nathan’s Trouble. It’s disconcerting, to look at this man with blue-gray eyes that should be familiar but aren’t (all sadistic amusement and unholy glee and ruthless menace), to watch him smile and laugh as he taunts her, to see his non-reaction to scalding coffee. To note that _he_ does not hold himself still and contained. He does not watch his feet as he walks, or stay keenly aware of everything around him, or keep himself small and tight to stop himself from being reminded of his affliction. All these mannerisms she thought Nathan had developed because of his Trouble, and yet she has never seen two men more dissimilar than Max Hansen and Nathan Wuornos (and it’s a relief, even if it is confusing).

“What are you here for?” she calls out to his retreating back, and she wants to tell him it better not be for Nathan. She wants to grab him and cuff him and personally escort him back to Shawshank (because she doesn’t need more than these few chilling moments to know she doesn’t ever want him anywhere near Nathan, particularly a pale, shaken Nathan). But he only looks at her over his shoulder and smirks, leaving her with nothing more than a few cryptic statements swimming on repeat in her head.

Audrey spends a sleepless night at the office with her phone in her hand, repeatedly tapping the button to keep Nathan’s name up on the screen. She calls a few times, but never gets an answer. She wants to respect his need for time, but she’s desperately worried and if she knew where he was, she knows herself well enough to be certain she’d be there right now no matter how much he asks her to back off. Only…only Audrey _doesn’t_ know where Nathan goes when he’s upset. Or what he does for fun besides watch sci-fi shows and read with maybe a bit of some kind of mysterious art thrown in between trips to the kitchen to make pancakes.

She doesn’t know if he plays a sport, or where he likes to go when he’s out of town, or who his childhood friends are. He’s been there for every step of her prolonged existential crisis, her first real friend, and yet she knows so little about him. Maybe she was trying to respect his silence, or wait for him to open up on his own, but in the small hours of the night, she begins to wonder if she’s just selfish. Too self-absorbed to really wonder at anything beyond what he shows to the whole world.

When her phone rings in her hand, Audrey jumps a foot in the air, tense and strained and exhausted.

“Nathan!” she snaps into the phone.

“Audrey,” Duke says, “you might want to come down to the _Gray Gull_. Hansen’s here. And so is Nathan.” He pauses (Audrey’s already out the door, about to hang up), then adds, very quietly, “Audrey, I think you should hurry. And…and bring a gun. Maybe two.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I had to sit down and watch 'Spiral' about a dozen times tryng to figure out what Hansen's plan really was. In the show, he died before we really knew, but I think, I THINK, that I've figured out what it was and if I'm right, wow, that guy is cold. Anyway, definitely some major changes piling up now, so hopefully I can keep juggling everything moving forward!
> 
> This is the end of 'Between The Lines: Friends,' but I'll start posting 'Between The Lines: Partners,' which covers season 2, next week. Bright spot is that I'm finally all moved in so postings should be much quicker! Thanks for sticking with me, and I'd love to hear what you think about the story!

When Audrey walks (runs, really, but carefully, one hand on her gun) into the _Gray Gull_ , she finds herself struck by the normality of the scene that greets her. Music playing in the background, glasses clinking against wooden tables or bar, the murmur of conversation, patrons laughing together or sitting hunched over and alone. It’s so normal, so _benign_ , that Audrey immediately feels a shiver run down her spine.

Her gaze flies across the room and settles on a huddle of quiet tension at the bar. Duke’s behind the counter, clenching a rag between his hands as if wishing something else were there. Max Hansen is smiling at him, standing casual but looming so that he seems to take up twice as much space as anyone else. And facing him, tight and small and self-contained (bristling and indignant and crackling like a stormcloud), is Nathan. The only thing missing is the chief, or maybe Vince and Dave with their pointed, bumbling observations.

“—not much worse than being the phantom in the room, now is there? Just ghosting through without ever feeling—or _making_ —an impression,” Hansen is saying, congenial, polite. Chilling, because Nathan’s shoulders hunch closer with each word.

Audrey crosses the room in long strides and finds herself coming to a halt with her shoulder in front of Nathan’s, as if she means to step between him and any possible blows. And she does. She will. He’s tall and upright, he’s stern and glowering, he’s strong and impervious…but this close, she can feel him trembling minutely. She may not know where he goes when he wants to be alone, but she knows what the line between his brows and the squint of his eyes mean.

(He’s hurt; he’s afraid; he feels alone).

“What’s going on here?” Audrey asks into the silence that fell the moment they became aware of her presence. “Is there a problem?”

“No problem,” Hansen says, still smiling, something that makes the entire scene seem even more surreal. “Just getting to know each other. A father ought to know his son, isn’t that right, Nathan?”

“I’d say you got to know me well enough already with your fists,” Nathan grits out. More than anything, Audrey wants to reach back and put her hands over his, wants to pull him into a hug and let him feel something besides the memory of whatever this monster did to him as a child. But. She doesn’t want to give away what she can do for Nathan (or for Hansen, and that more than anything makes her go coldly angry, this unwelcome reminder that the gift she can provide for Nathan is not personal, not just for him, but a simple byproduct of her seeming immunity to the Troubles).

“Kids don’t always have the best memories,” is all Hansen says, as untouched by Nathan’s accusation as by any sensation. “Besides, Garland Wuornos didn’t give me much time with you or your mom, what with all those accusations he was making, that damning testimony he had to rehearse in order to get a judge to sentence me to Shawshank.” His smile doesn’t waver, but it goes hollow, numb, _empty._ As empty as the man’s soul, Audrey thinks, and doesn’t even care if it seems melodramatic.

“You’ve been here this whole time, Nathan,” Hansen says softly. “Here in Haven, living your own life, pretending to be someone and something you’re not. But me? The man you call ‘Dad’ sent me to a place _outside_ Haven. Sent me to a prison where nothing was real and everything was removed. No twenty-seven years of peace for me. No reprieve. You think that’s fair?”

Nathan is rigid when Audrey leans, almost imperceptibly, back into him. Every muscle is corded tight with his tension (she wonders if he’s aware of it, or if he only knows that his thoughts are strained and pulled).

“Hey,” Duke says, setting the rag down on the bar. Leaning on it with both hands. Smiling congenially. Showing all his teeth in a concealed snarl. Drawing Hansen’s attention from Nathan even though Audrey can tell he’s scared, too. “Consequences come to us all. Let’s just take it like men, shall we?” He slants a measuring look to Audrey. “In a manner of speaking. You know what I mean.”

“You’re right, Crocker.” Hansen tilts his head as he turns to face Duke. In an instant, it’s as if he’s forgotten Nathan’s presence entirely.

Audrey chances a quick look back to the journalist—she sucks her breath in when she sees a spot of blood on his neck, like something pricked him. (A test? she wonders. Hansen wanted confirmation, maybe? Why? Just so he could taunt Nathan?) None of this makes any sense, but Audrey can’t take the time to think it through, not now, while Hansen’s right in front of her and Nathan is so vulnerable.

Hansen steps closer to Duke, ignoring the way Duke tenses and slowly backs up, the rag forgotten on the table as his hands drift out of sight. “You and your family know all about consequences—and avoiding them. Don’t you?”

Duke narrows his eyes, still smiling that masked snarl. Anyone looking from far away would think him the perfect host. Audrey unsnaps her holster, the heft of her gun familiar and comforting against her palm.

“What does my family have to do with anything?” Duke asks. Calm. Curious. Seething.

“Oh, more than you know. Haven’s always been the home of Crockers, and for good reason.” Hansen tilts his head. “But maybe you _don’t_ know yet. And that’d be a real shame, what with my reason for coming here and all. Vince has been keeping you safe and protected, has he? Wouldn’t want you sullying your hands with any blood while his…secrets…are here.”

Audrey feels like the conversation is veering madly off into nowhere. Duke has lost his smile in favor of sudden unhidden interest, Nathan is deathly quiet behind her, and Audrey wants answers, but not here, not like this, standing in the eye of the storm while Hansen shields himself behind the normal patrons enjoying their lunch.

“What do you want, Hansen?” she demands, moving solidly into the man’s field of vision. It breaks her contact with Nathan, but she can still feel his presence, like electricity in the air (the sense of a storm about to break). “I think we all know you’re here for a reason, so stop playing games.”

“I just want a piece of that Haven I was denied for near on ten-thousand days.” Hansen takes a step closer to the bar. Duke moves in such a way that Audrey would bet every answer she so desperately wants that he’s holding some kind of weapon in his hands. But just then, staring in Hansen’s dead eyes, she thinks Duke has every reason in the world to be terrified of this man and the tattoo that matches Nathan’s. “I want the reprieve that was stolen from me—and if I have to make new friends to make certain I get it, then that’s what I’ll do. The old ones never did anything for me in the end, after all.”

“Then why come to me?” Duke interjects.

“Well, Nathan here can’t feel anything,” Hansen smirks at Nathan over his shoulder, “so smart, so brave—so Troubled. A Crocker might as well work _for_ me for once rather than against us all. And”—Hansen swells, his shoulders rising, his chest expanding so that Audrey feels as if all the oxygen has been sucked from the room—“well, having a son has to come in handy eventually.”

The last word isn’t even out of his mouth before he’s over the counter, grappling with Duke, a shotgun trapped between them. Audrey has her gun in hand, but the two are locked so closely, are wriggling against the bar, glasses shattering on the floor and spattering nicks along her forearms, that she doesn’t dare take the shot.

Duke goes sailing back against the wall, bringing jars of liquor down around him. Hansen has the shotgun in his hands, but he tosses it aside and advances on Duke.

“Stop right now.” Audrey levels the gun and feels certainty take the place of all her fear and exhaustion and confusion. No hesitation, no doubts, no wavering (she never feels more certain of _who_ she is than when she can help people). “Take another step and I _will_ shoot you.”

“Not everyone’s glad you’re back, you know,” Hansen says, conversationally. “In fact, some people around here would rather they never saw you again. You, or any other version of you.”

“What are you talking about?”

A rookie mistake. A _stupid_ mistake.

In the instant that she lets her rampant desire for questions rise to the surface, Hansen moves, grabbing her arm and sending her hurtling toward Duke. The gun goes flying, and when she looks up, dazed and trying to get to her feet, Hansen has Nathan in a headlock. Nathan is still, his eyes fixed on her. Audrey’s heart is in her throat, Duke’s groan sounds behind her, and Nathan flicks his eyes to her left.

To her gun. Slid just under the counter.

Hansen forces Nathan toward Duke. “If Vince hadn’t of interfered, it might have never come to this. But I have new friends now, friends that are more than willing to make a trade. But to be one of them, _son_ , certain sacrifices are going to have to be made.”

Audrey lurches upright in a move much more uncoordinated than she actually feels (her foot toes the gun and sends it skidding across the floor). “Hey now,” she says, slurring her words. “I think we can work this out.”

“Oh, you will.” Hansen laughs (Nathan traps the gun under one of his feet). “Eventually.”

Duke rises, a hand on Audrey’s arm (to steady her or ally with her, either one, maybe both, solid and _there_ ), and Hansen grins. There’s a knife in his hand, a red stripe appears down Nathan’s forearm like magic, and Audrey’s panic is choking her.

“Here, Crocker,” Hansen calls. “Make yourself useful.”

He shoves Nathan toward Duke. Nathan stumbles, falls to a knee. Audrey dives toward Hansen.

A gunshot sounds.

Duke yelps and flinches, hands flying to his chest to search for the bullet wound.

Hansen laughs again. A cold, cruel sound. Wet. Gurgling. His eyes widen when he hears death in his throat, and in an odd reflection of Duke, he brings his hand to his chest. He stares at his fingers, painted red, then looks up. Past Audrey. Past Duke.

To Nathan. Still kneeling. Audrey’s gun in his hand. His eyes implacable, his face fixed, his hand rock-steady.

“Stupid,” Hansen mutters. “With a Crocker right there…”

When he topples, the thud of his body hitting the bar reverberates through Audrey’s bones until her teeth ache.

He had answers. He knew things. He would, she is sure, have divulged those answers to her if approached in the right way. But standing there in the debris of a shattered scene of normality, Audrey is not sorry at all to see Max Hansen’s eyes turn as dead as his soul.

“Thank you!” Duke shouts, jubilant. He spins and addresses the _Gull’s_ dining room (emptied now by customers who have thought of much better places to be), throwing his hands wide as if to take a bow. “Thank you, _thank you_! That is outstanding. Nathan, I owe you a beer, maybe two. How about a Scotch, even? Let’s celebrate.”

“Nathan,” Audrey says more quietly. She approaches him like she would a trauma victim (like the survivor of a horrific crime). “You okay?”

He doesn’t seem to hear her. It is only when she slides her hand over his to take the gun that he even seems to realize she is there. When he looks up at her, she cannot read his expression. She doesn’t know what he’s thinking. She cannot feel any of the tiny tremors he was exhibiting before. (The blotch of red on his neck, the gash on his arm, are stark reminders of the monster at their feet.)

“Nathan?” Something (some impulse she doesn’t examine too closely) prompts her to keep her hand on his, loosely clasping the side of his palm. His hand is warm but limp. “Nathan, it’s okay.”

“He wanted me dead,” Nathan tells her. As if he is only now fully comprehending it. “He wanted me dead and he wanted Duke to do it.”

“Yeah. I…I think so, yeah.”

“But why?”

“Why?” Duke exclaims. “Because he was crazy, that’s why. You heard him spouting off about Crockers having some grand role in Haven—unless he meant being the town drunk and deadbeat dad, there’s no way he actually knew anything about Simon Crocker.”

Nathan blinks, and Audrey watches as he closes himself once more behind his walls. Pulling his hands free of hers, he rises to his feet. Audrey takes a step toward him, but he’s already backing up. “Guess I better call the Herald and tell them I won’t be in today,” he mutters before fleeing to the deck.

“Hey, Nate, thanks for dropping by!” Duke calls after him, but when he turns back to Audrey, she can tell he doesn’t feel any of the easiness that infused his voice. “Audrey,” he says lowly, “he’s dead. The man with the tattoo is dead.”

Audrey stares up at him (it seems too cruel, too cutting, that she and both her friends in town have to come each to their own terrible conclusions all at once: she with Lucy’s scar on her foot, Nathan with his birth father back to see him dead, and now Duke with his fate still hanging over him). “Duke,” she says, “if I were you, I’d be much more concerned about the tattoo than the man who’s dead. Just because Max Hansen isn’t a threat anymore doesn’t mean there’s not other people out there with the same symbol on their arm.”

For a long moment, Duke stares at her. Then, methodically, he turns, bends, and scoops up the discarded shotgun. “You’re right. And lest we forget, one of those hypothetical people is Nathan himself.”

Despite everything, Audrey can’t help but gape at him. “You can’t really believe that Nathan would kill you.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him to try.” Duke glowers, puffed up and threatening, that smooth veneer of charm painted too thinly over the deeper layer of ruthlessness he likes to pretend is the center of who he is (but Audrey knows him, knows the survivalist is only a veneer, too). “But no, I’m much more interested in _why_ he has that tattoo. And what _he_ thinks it means.”

“Not right now,” Audrey says pointedly. She doesn’t even realize she’s slid between Duke and the door Nathan walked through until he raises a eyebrow at her. “Give him time. He…he just went through a lot, and he’ll have to give a statement, and…just not right now.”

“Not right now,” Duke promises. “But soon.”

Audrey’s got her phone in her hand, the station half-dialed, when she turns and meets Duke’s gaze. “Duke, when I mentioned the tattoo to Hansen earlier…he said that if I wanted to find it, I should check the cemetery.”

“Oh, lovely. Just what I wanted to hear. Thank you, Audrey, you’re always such a pleasure.”

Ignoring the rest of his monologue, Audrey finishes dialing the station. She made a promise to Garland, after all. Time to pay up.

* * *

“You’re safe,” Garland says, when he comes stomping into the _Gull_ and sees Nathan standing solitary and still in the corner, a napkin Audrey gave him pressed to the spot of red on his neck, a crude bandage wrapped around his arm. “You’re all right.” He reaches out to clasp a hand over Nathan’s shoulder.

Nathan recoils, the move so sharp and sudden that Audrey feels herself flinch. Garland freezes. Nathan has a warding hand up, a wall between him and his father.

“Son,” Garland says, soft and worn. Tired and defeated. But still he steps forward.

“Don’t touch me!” Nathan snarls, and Audrey has never heard, never seen, Nathan so close to breaking his resolute stoicism. “You knew he was in town—you knew he was out of prison, and you couldn’t tell me yourself? You just hid in the station?”

“I—”

“No! If you couldn’t talk to me then, there’s no need to now.” Nathan backs up, a step at a time, that arm still up, a shield made strong by its senseless nerves and ineffectual by its numbness, as certain as a line drawn in the sand. When he finally turns to stride away, he looks too slight, too small, hunched and withdrawn (bristling and defensive).

Garland swallows, carefully does not look at Audrey or Duke, and takes a deep breath. “Well,” he says, drawing out a piece of Nicotine gum. “Guess he’s all right. Probably shouldn’t make him shoot two fathers in one day.” He stares at the gum, then scoffs and shoves it back in his pocket in favor of a cigarette he’s already lighting even before he makes it out the door.

“Huh.” Duke lets out a mirthless laugh. “And I thought my relationship with my dad was messed up.”

“Guess we all have our sob stories,” Audrey says shortly.

Frowning, Duke leans in toward her. “What did he mean…two fathers?”

It’s unfair, being backed into a corner like this after everything that just happened (being forced to pay attention to this conversation when she _knows_ Nathan is all alone and hurting). Finally, when she can’t think of anything to say but the truth, she sighs.

“Max Hansen was Nathan’s birth father.”

“That…” He half points toward the spot where the body lies, surrounded by police. “ _That_ was Nathan’s dad?”

“No,” Audrey snaps. “Garland Wuornos is his dad. That’s just a monster masquerading as a human.”

Duke scratches his head and huffs. “Well, guess everyone still has surprises up their sleeves, no matter how long you’ve known them.”

“Yeah,” Audrey says, staring after Nathan before she remembers that Duke isn’t unaffected by these events either. “So…you going to relax now, Duke? At least put down the shotgun long enough to serve some drinks to your customers?”

“What customers?” He smiles, but it’s pale and tired. “Too many cops swarming this place for any of my usuals to show up for a few days.”

Audrey sighs, wishing she could do something to make his smile more genuine. Duke’s a smuggler, a criminal, but she likes it best when his heart of gold shows through charming smiles and slightly on-the-nose humor. “We changed someone’s fate before,” she says. “We can do it again.”

“Yeah. Maybe. But this is Haven, and if I know anything about this town, it’s that it never runs out of ways to screw you over. Today being a good case in point.” He shrugs and pastes on a cracked smile (so different from the charming smirk she’s grown used to and would do so much to bring back). “I’m all right, Audrey. Trust me, right now, I think someone else needs you more.” He casts a pointed look after Nathan.

Audrey smiles. It’s always nice to see that the ambivalence they both play at isn’t as real as they want themselves to believe. “Yeah.”

“Hey.” Duke catches her arm. When she meets his eyes, she sees sincerity, dark and warm and oddly more attractive than his normal flirtation. “I hope you can tell him whatever it is that’s eating you up inside. Even though I don’t understand why he’s the one you want to tell first.”

“Thanks, Duke.” She squeezes his hand (feels a pang, sharp and searing, because this is such a small gesture for her and Duke, but it is the world to Nathan). “I’ll catch up with you later.”

“Don’t worry—I have a trip to the cemetery to make.”

* * *

He’s curled up in a ball on the beach just a mile or so down from where the Colorado Kid died, his knees up, his arms twined around his neck, his head bowed toward the ground. Audrey’s never seen a clearer picture of someone using body language to scream out _don’t touch me! I’m alone, I’m hurting, I don’t think I can be helped._ It’s heartbreaking and frustrating all at once, because she knows Nathan would like nothing more than to be helped, to be touched, that he hates being alone. But this town and his Trouble have led him to believe there is nothing more for him than his isolation.

(Except there is. _She_ can reach him, can touch him—not because she is apparently immune to the Troubles, but because they are friends and she knows, sometimes, how to say and do the right thing to make the tight lines of his shoulders ease, to cause the corner of his mouth to light the twinkle in sea-colored eyes.)

She walks up behind him (knows he hears her coming when he tenses). Sits beside him (knows he’s happy she’s there when he doesn’t tighten in on himself). Stares out at the lapping waves silently (knows she is touching him just by her presence, by _choosing_ to come after him). The sand is warm beneath her, the sun bathes her skin, she can feel heat radiating from Nathan, and yet she feels cold—because _he_ is cold. He is numb. The sun might as well be an abstract concept for all he can feel it, and for the thousandth time, she realizes anew how isolating his affliction is. How removed he actually is from the basic things that connect everyone else on the planet.

Only one person could fully understand, and Nathan had to shoot him.

Slowly, Nathan uncurls enough to look out in the direction of her gaze. “He knew just what to say,” he finally admits (uncanny reflection to her own thoughts). Audrey looks at him, minimizing her reaction so as not to startle him back into his shell. She watches his throat bob as he swallows hard. “Do you…do you think I’m going to end up just like him?”

“What?” She can’t help her gaping stare, or the answering denial as deep and immutable as the mysteries of this town. “Nathan. _No_.”

She’s not consoling him. She’s not talking him down (as if he is no more than another in the long line of those victimized by the strangeness of Haven). She looks at this tall, slender man, always carrying a camera case, playing with his pen and notepad without even realizing it—this man who’s followed her without question into the most dangerous and unpredictable of situations and never wavered. She looks at him and literally _cannot_ imagine him as a monster like Max Hansen.

“No,” she says again. “You couldn’t. You won’t.”

He squints into the sunlight, his jaw tense, his hands white-knuckled, clasped over his knees. “The things he said are true, though. I _do_ feel like a phantom, a ghost that can’t reach the real world. Sometimes…” He grimaces, as if apologizing for his next words (as if embarrassed to give anything away, to let it out from its locked place deep inside him). “Sometimes it seems like I’m the only thing in the world that’s…that’s real. And it’s impossible to connect to—to _anything_ else.”

Her hand falls over his, pries his fingers away from their painful grip, moves his hand to rest under hers on the heated sand. It wasn’t a conscious, premeditated thought, but she doesn’t regret it. Seeing his eyes flutter, his throat work, his gaze fix on their hands, she wonders yet again why she doesn’t do this more often (why he never initiates it).

“Touch isn’t all about nerve endings,” she murmurs. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, and certainly the first friend I made when coming to Haven. You’ve helped me, and saved my life, and made everything better, made investigating all these strange cases _fun_. You’ve touched me, Nathan, and you did that with words and actions—and those are so much more important.”

He doesn’t reply (not that she really expects him to), just looks up from their hands to stare at her. His expression is so powerful, so unguarded (so vulnerable and so revealing) that she has to look away, pull her hand free, force a small laugh (do her own version of huddling in on herself in a self-protective ball).

“Besides,” she says teasingly, “if you’re ever in danger of becoming a monster, I’d just sic Duke on you.”

The moment is broken. Nathan looks away, his soul once more walled up behind stark stoicism, and Audrey wishes she hadn’t let go of his hand.

She’d meant to tell him about Lucy Ripley, really, she had, but just then, she can’t bring herself to do it. She tries to make the words rise in her throat, to fly out into the air, but there is nothing there. Her throat is too dry, her tongue too thick, her voice lost somewhere in the waves.

When the awkwardness grows too unwieldy, Audrey rises with some excuse about having to get to the station.

Nathan doesn’t stop her.

* * *

“Well?” Garland asks when she reaches the station. “How is he?”

“He’s…he’s fine.” She hears how insufficient her answer is as quickly as the chief does.

“Fine.” He stares at her in disbelief. “And you bought that? The kid just shot his own birth father, the man who beat his mother in front of him and then started in on him, and what? He’s ready to go back to work now?”

“Why don’t you go after him?” she snaps. “ _You’re_ his father—shouldn’t you know what to say to him to help him?”

Garland looks away as he pulls out another cigarette. “You saw,” he says shortly. “I’m not what Nathan needs right now.”

Frustrated, Audrey sighs and moves to brush past him. His hand on her arm stops her.

“Hey,” Garland says, almost uncertainly. “Did Hansen…did that man say anything about Nathan or…or Vince?”

“No.” Audrey scowls. “Why?”

His uncertainty is swallowed up by gruffness. “No reason.”

“He did say that not everyone was happy to see me,” she can’t help saying. “Any idea what he meant by that?”

“I have no idea what’s in that man’s head!” Garlands out-scowls her. “The man’s pure evil. I’m not sorry he’s dead. I’m just sorry Nathan had to be the one to do it.”

And he stumps away, leaving her feeling guilty and worried about Nathan all over again.

* * *

She calls him. He doesn’t answer. The third time, she leaves a short message telling him they need to talk.

When he doesn’t call back, Audrey leaves the station.

(She hates feeling like she failed.)

* * *

Nathan finds her, as she hoped he would (but told herself not to expect). The beach where the Colorado Kid was killed has called to her from the first moment she saw the grainy picture in the old newspaper print. It seems to hold a gravity that pulls and tugs until she returns to its orbit, usually when she feels most adrift. It is a tether that reminds her she _has_ left a mark, she is more than a ghost—even as it reminds her of all the things she _doesn’t_ know (the person she might _not_ be, or the person she _is_ , or _was_ , or something even more confusing and incomprehensible).

She doesn’t remember mentioning the allure of this spot of beach to Nathan, but he’s found her here before, coming to drive her somewhere or give her a cup of coffee or just stand there in the background, _seeing_ her (making her real).

When she looks up, ankle-high in green grass, he’s there, approaching with his face open, eyes fixed on her. He gives no sign that he is upset at her for leaving him earlier.

For all that she hoped he would come, she is caught unprepared. Her thoughts are too mired in Lucy and the Colorado Kid article; she isn’t ready to switch gears so quickly to face whatever it is Nathan is going through. Or even to know what that might be—if he is horrified at what he did (as Garland thinks) or relieved the monster from his past is gone (as Duke seemed to believe). If he is hurting or cold, angry or sad, a little boy lost or a man set adrift with questions that will never be answered (as she is). She doesn’t _know_ and isn’t that just the way of things (for all she wants to be there for Nathan, she always feels so unqualified, left floundering and uncertain even as she takes comfort in his mere presence).

“Nathan!” Audrey pulls up short, then wishes she had just kept walking so she could have used momentum as excuse enough to pull him into a hug, could have made it look effortless and natural (as natural as possible when they’ve only hugged once before and it shook the foundations of his isolated world and her status as a free agent).

“Audrey,” he says, and this, too, catches her off-guard. He so rarely calls her by her first name that it sounds strange, fluttering clumsily around their heads before falling to the ground with a thud that reminds her she does have something she wants to say to him.

“I’m sorry,” she blurts out, and is rewarded with his quizzical look. (He plays golf, of course, she remembers an entire morning trying to envision him out on some green, civilized and out of the wilderness, separated from the sea; it doesn’t seem natural at all, and yet it’s _him_ , a piece integrated into the whole of him forming in her mind, in her heart.) “Nathan, I should have been faster—I shouldn’t have let Hansen distract me, I should never have put you into the position where you had to—”

“Parker.”

Her words dry and wither and disintegrate to dust as he reaches out his hand to clasp hers. A simple touch (except no touch is _ever_ simple between them, is it?), mimicry of how she held his so few hours earlier, her gun still warm between them from its killing discharge.

“It’s nothing,” Nathan tells her (which only convinces her of the opposite). “I’m glad I was able to help. To do something.”

Ordinarily, she thinks she would let it go like she did a few hours ago. But he’s still touching her (anchoring her so that the sky and secrets that threaten to swallow her up cannot lift her away and cause her to vanish as easily as Lucy Ripley did), so instead she says, “It’s just…I feel like all I do is put you in danger. Since the first moment I came to town, you’ve been on the edge of cliffs and right in the middle of the Troubles and the target of monsters. I’m supposed to protect people, to _help_ them, but the best I can do for my _best friend_ is—”

“You do help,” he says. He drops her hand. “You help me all the time. And I…I kind of thought we protected each other.”

“But…” She stares up at him, struck all over again by how much he can say with so little. “But he was your father. You shouldn’t have had—”

“The chief is my father.” He hesitates, a telling moment that makes her grab for his hand, hold it between both of hers, watch as his eyes flutter and the suggestion of a smile curves the edges of his lips. When he looks back up at her, she actually shifts beneath the intensity of his stare. “It was better, for me, to be there. To be able to do something. All the…all the times he came after my mother, I couldn’t…I couldn’t always get between them. Today…today, I could do something.”

Audrey tightens her hold on his hand. Her cheek tickles so that she knows a tear has slipped free to wind its slow way along the edge of her nose, but she doesn’t want to let go of Nathan even long enough to wipe it away.

“Speaking of mothers,” she says slowly (her voice threatens to crack). “There’s something that I need to tell you, Nathan. Something I found out about Lucy Ripley.”

He looks up from their hands to her, something almost resigned in his expression. “She’s not your mother?”

“It’s way weirder than that,” she admits, and finally drops his hand (she can’t drag him further down this rabbit hole, though she hopes he will come with her willingly). “This is going to sound crazy, but all this time, I’ve been looking for Lucy Ripley, thinking she was my mom. But, Nathan, I…I _am_ Lucy Ripley.”

For all that she’s been waiting for the chance to tell him this (earth-shaking) revelation, she has not spent a lot of time imagining his response. She knew he would believe her (of course he would, he always does), and that he would follow her lead, and that his silence and small statements would ignite her brain into overload as she talked her way through theories and leads. But she did think there would be _some_ surprise, maybe some disbelief, maybe some crack about aging with dignity.

Instead, he squints at her (just like he did the first time she met him, when she showed him her badge and asked him for a ride to town), looks down and away, swallows, and then nods. “So,” he says, “if it’s some kind of immortality or memory-altering Trouble, that doesn’t explain why you’re immune to every other Trouble.”

“Wait.” Audrey shakes her head and finally wipes away her tears. “That’s it? Nothing about how impossible this is? Not even a joke about me ignoring the rational in favor of the weird? No comments on Haven just being a normal small town?”

Nathan tilts his head. “I think we’re past that, Parker. And nobody looks that much like their mom. At least, not in Haven.”

“Not in Haven,” she agrees. And, suddenly, it feels _real_. It feels _inescapable_.

She is not Audrey Parker. She was (or was she?) Lucy Ripley. She has been here before. She has helped the Troubled before. Held James Garrick in her hands and talked people down from their afflictions, held Duke’s hand and stood on this beach and maybe even (for all she knows) met Nathan before. The chief knew her before she ever interfered in his standard cover-up on a Troubled case and the Teagues brothers have done their run-around almost three decades ago just the way they do now.

The world spirals around her in a huge circular orbit that doesn’t touch her at all, leaving her stranded in the eye of the vortex, small and insignificant but nonetheless set apart.

Just then, Nathan shifts his shoulders. A small movement that creates sound and the whisper of a breeze, that ghosts his clean sea-and-ink-and-syrup smell along her nostrils, that reminds her she is not alone in this vortex. Nathan is here. Nathan is right beside her.

“Nathan—”

She’s not sure what she meant to say (maybe nothing; maybe just his name, to reassure herself he isn’t leaving and to remind him she is there for him, too), but an instant later, none of it matters anymore.

An instant later, she and Nathan are no longer alone, and the scene that has meant everything to her because it’s when she met her first friend is replayed as if it (as if _she_ ) is easily replaceable.

“Are you Audrey Parker?” the stranger asks, breaking into their bubble with so little effort.

“Who are you?” Nathan asks while Audrey tries to regain her composure.

“I’m with the FBI,” the woman says. “Who are _you_?”

“You’re here about Hansen?” Audrey asks.

“Are you Audrey Parker?” the woman demands.

“Why?” Nathan interjects, stepping forward.

The stranger gives a dry chuckle. “I see I’ll have to brush up on my monosyllabic while I’m here.”

Audrey can’t help but slide a sideways glance to Nathan only to see him doing the same to her.

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea to give out my name to a strange woman carrying a gun,” Audrey finally says (hoping this is a dream, hoping she’ll wake up and Hansen will still be in prison and Nathan will be outside waiting for her and Duke will be smiling and unburdened and Lucy Ripley will be the mom who can fulfill all her dreams of rescuing lonely children).

“I told you, I’m with the FBI.”

Audrey moves, shifting her hands to put them in her pockets against the chill of the wind (missing the warmth of Nathan’s hand), and that’s when everything explodes.

The woman draws her gun and points it at them. Audrey’s a second behind her, Nathan sliding back so that he’s not blocking her shot.

“Haven PD,” Audrey snaps, suddenly incensed. On top of everything else this day has thrown at her, she doesn’t need _this_. “Who are you?”

“I’m with the FBI, are you deaf?” The woman’s gun doesn’t waver as she pulls out her badge (something in Audrey shakes to see Nathan squinting at this badge the way he did hers). “My name is Special Agent Audrey Parker, and I want to know exactly who you are and why you’ve been impersonating me.”

The ground crumbles beneath Audrey’s feet ( _Lucy’s_ feet?), and she has nothing to hold onto. Nothing to cling to. Only a name that isn’t hers. Only a picture that _is_ her. Only a gun that trembles in suddenly unsteady hands.


End file.
